Dickensian reading: "The Goldfinch" by Donna Tartt

To attempt to write anything about Donna Tartt's lengthy (800+ pages, in my edition) novel is, it seems, to venture into a debate about What is Art?, What is Literature? and other Big Questions. The critics are divided, with the bulk of reviewers - as well as the general public, if stellar sales are anything to go by - firmly placing the novel in the category of literary greatness, but with a dissenting minority of highbrow commentators crying foul, depicting the book as faux-literary pulp for an infantilised readership that cannot tell the difference any more. In an age when such elitism is scorned on principle, it would be easy to dismiss the latter school as snobbish and out of touch, but, on a different principle, I see virtue in someone at least trying to stand up for some notion of absolute merit, however subjective and slippery such judgements will be. 

I don't honestly know - to take one measure used in this particular debate - whether Tartt's Goldfinch will display the cultural durability of the Fabritius painting from which it takes its title. Will the novel still be admired in 300 years in the way that the painting is today? (Not - confession time - that I had previously heard of this Dutch masterpiece before the book made me aware of it.) Perhaps the problem is that, as many have noted, The Goldfinch occupies a literary space very similar to that staked out a century and a half ago, by Charles Dickens.

Indeed, you can take the characters and plot of The Goldfinch and match them, as many have, to equivalents in Oliver Twist. The hero, Theo Decker, is the orphan protagonist, his best friend, the extraordinary Boris, is the Artful Dodger, Theo's gambler father, Larry, is a sort of Fagin and so on. More than this though, the equivalence lies in the kind of book this is and the way it tells its story. Many, mixing the literary reference points, describe this as a Bildungsroman, the story of Theo's life and formative vicissitudes following the catastrophic event which defines the rest of his life. His strengths and his weaknesses play out in interaction with a magnificent gallery of characters, in a world full of twists, turns and coincidences, in sharply contrasting environments: the different Manhattans which together make up his true home, the bleakly foreclosed McMansion territory of peripheral Las Vegas to which he is brutally transplanted for most of his adolescent years, as well as a cold, dark and claustrophobic Amsterdam where climatic events take place. 

The Goldfinch, a painting by
Carel Fabritius (1654)

Like Dickens, Tartt writes a plot-driven, page turning narrative, something which in itself perhaps troubles the highbrow critics of the book. Dickens of course wrote to entertain, his novels famously emerging in instalments, paid for practically by the word by newspaper proprietors. This didn't void them of literary merit. The Goldfinch, though not written in the same way - indeed, Tartt is a notoriously slow writer, with this novel some ten years in the making - shares many Dickensian attributes. This is for example, despite its length, not a difficult or challenging read in itself, the story rattling along satisfyingly throughout. Perhaps neither characters nor plot are fully plausible at all times, but they are memorable and superbly evoked. Best of all is Theo's great lifelong friend, Boris, whom he meets in the desolate Vegas years, a worldly-unwise, drugged-up, precociously dodgy, effectively parentless Russian (or is it Ukrainian?) boy who washes up in the desert and teaches Theo the merits of perilous amounts of alcohol and drugs, the Great Russian Novel, shoplifting and the value of true friendship. Boris illuminates the pages on which he features. Alongside him, in a gallery of great characters, we have a wealthy Upper East Side family who take young Theo in for a while, whose high society lifestyle disguises both genuine concern for him and a strain of manic mental instability; the gentle giant Hobie, a surrogate parent for Theo, who provides a degree of security and refuge for his lost soul in a hopelessly uneconomic antiques restoration shop in Greenwich Village; the damaged and unworldly Pippa, who alone in the world shares Theo's defining experience, but though deeply loved and loving, remains always just out of reach; Theo's deadbeat dad, Larry, living off gambling and mixing dangerously with the Vegas underworld, swinging incomprehensibly between self-pity, some sort of real love for his son, the sense of life as a performance and cynical exploitation of his nearest and dearest, including his drug-and-alcohol addicted girlfriend, the wonderfully renamed Xandra, who turns out to be a bit better than her druggy, burned-out sexpot exterior might suggest. 


Reading this novel, you are drawn wholly into Theo's crazy, mixed up world. For me, more than anything, it is a journey of anxiousness. There is a constant sense of drug-addled dread, the expectation of disaster, that things will again fall apart. This is one of Tartt's great achievements in this book, to imbue her main character, who first-person narrates throughout, and thus the novel as a whole, with a pervasive post-traumatic nihilism and angst borne of the defining catastrophe which sets Theo on his journey, and yet somehow to find redemption. 

Ostensibly, as a surprising last few pages of exposition would have it, the novel is about the redemptive powers of art and history, the importance of objects and beauty, the value in preserving what is beautiful. 

Donna Tartt

I'm not convinced. Certainly, the novel conveys a sense of importance in a devotion to art, craft and beauty, which are at least as good as devotion to anything else. Of course, it is a beautiful artwork which provides a talisman for a lost, loved mother as well as a value for which people are ready to fight and even die. But the energy of this novel comes from elsewhere, above all from its characters, while redemption lies in the core friendships and relationships which give a frame to Theo's seemingly irreparably damaged life, and provide him with some sort of sanctuary from his own weaknesses. 

So, literary merit? I think so. Tartt has written a book which carries the reader along in a spellbinding story, but, in doing so, says a lot about people, friendship, the world, and, yes, art, which is worth saying. Notwithstanding some occasional infelicities, which her critics have picked up on, it is beautifully and stylishly written, occasionally providing the odd "wow" sentence along the way. It is decidedly a book worth reading.