THE GOLDFINCH by Donna Tartt (Little Brown), 872 pages, $33 cloth. Rating: NNNNN
Don’t be daunted by The Goldfinch’s doorstop length. Donna Tartt’s novel – among many reviewers’ 2013 top 10 picks and currently number 2 on the New York Times bestseller list – is a rich, exquisitely written rumination on grief and art and where the two intersect.
Thirteen-year-old Theo and his mother are on their way to meet his school principal when they make a detour to the museum to see her favourite painting, Carel Fabritius’s Goldfinch. When a terrorist’s bomb explodes, Theo encounters a dying man who gives him a ring and an address to which he should deliver it and tells him to “save” the painting.
Unable to find his mother, who it turns out was killed in the explosion, the boy heads home with the artwork. The ring leads him to Hobie, an antiques refurbisher in Greenwich Village who winds up employing him (the details on antique restoration are stunning), but not before Theo, now without a guardian, his father long gone, is shunted from home to home, his treasure always in tow and becoming more of a burden with each passing day.
Tartt’s vivid prose evokes vibrant New York City and soulless Las Vegas, and the plot takes as many twists as the streets of Amsterdam, where the story reaches its climax.
The characters are fully developed. Theo, who’s hardly an innocent – he’s already a skilled thief when we meet him – develops a serious drug dependency and eventually gets way too deep into an antiques scam. But we’re hooked by his terrible grief and his obsessions – with a girl he encountered in the museum and with the stolen treasure.
Lucien Reeve, who may know what Theo’s up to, is all slime, and budding criminal Boris, the best friend and nemesis Theo meets in Vegas, jumps right off the page and into your face, funny, daring and wholly loving of his much less reckless pal.
In the end, though, as mesmerizing as the action is, The Goldfinch is as much a meditation on the life-changing power of art.
Read it.
susanc@nowtoronto.com | @susangcole
