DONNA TARTT The Goldfinch. Reviewed by Michael Jongen
Is life a gift? Taking us from New York to Las Vegas to Amsterdam, Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch is a richly textured examination of survival.
Theo Decker is the 13-year-old survivor of the bombing of a museum he is visiting with his mother. Before the explosion he was attracted to a girl he saw there:
Why did I obsess over people like this? Was it normal to fixate on strangers in this particular vivid, fevered way? I didn’t think so. It was impossible to imagine some random passer-by on the street forming quite such an interest in me … I knew I would go home and wonder about this girl and her grandfather the same way.
In the immediate aftermath of the bomb, in beautiful dreamlike prose, Theo wonders about his absent mother, the girl, Pippa, who has disappeared, and speaks with the dying Welty, her guardian. He discreetly leaves the museum amidst the chaos and heads home to wait for his mother, who doesn’t come. His emotions and actions on that day will guide the rest of his life, determining his direction and survival through adolescence and into adulthood.
Pippa is to be the object of Theo’s desires, his reason to live, the one who can share his pain and loss. Her approbation becomes the measure of his own moral fibre. His initial quest to find her brings him to Hobie, a wonderfully Dickensian character appropriate to this magnificently sprawling novel’s 19th-century plot.
Theo has been taken in by his friend Andy’s rich family, who afford him a very different New York lifestyle from the one he’s used to, and seem amenable to taking responsibility for him. Theo adapts and is happy enough living with his only friend. When he does find Pippa, she has just left hospital and still requires rest and recuperation. She needs Theo; the bond of the explosion and its sorrows is strong. He becomes a welcome guest to Hobie, who is grateful for the impact the visits have on Pippa’s recovery.
Then a distant aunt of Pippa’s claims her from Hobie, and Theo moves to Las Vegas to be reunited with his long absent father.
As Theo says, early in the story, about his mother, ‘Things would have turned out better if she had lived.’
In Las Vegas, he lives with his father and his partner Xandra, who lead a garish lifestyle after the restraint and gentility of old New York, and he also meets Boris. with whom he forms an intense relationship. Theo’s moral compass now vacillates between the amoral Boris and the correct Andy.
Tartt’s writing in the Las Vegas section of the novel creates a surreal environment of boarded-up failed luxury housing estates and takes us into another world, where art and culture have no currency. It was at this point that I fell in love with the novel.
Xandra turns out to sell party drugs at the gym where she works as a personal trainer; Theo’s father has always been a chancer who has survived by betting and taking small margins until he gets in too deep with the Las Vegas mob. They both become unstuck and Theo and Boris take their opportunity to flee Las Vegas with Xandra’s money and supplies. Theo splits from Boris and heads back to New York, where he finds his way to Hobie’s antiques store, seeking refuge and purpose. He resumes his relationship with Andy’s family, the Barbours, and becomes engaged to Kitsey, Andy’s younger sister.
Then when Boris re-enters the novel, everything that has sustained Theo since the bombing is undermined until Boris and Theo go to Amsterdam seeking redemption, in an intense Tarantino-esque finale to the story.
Theo speaks directly to camera:
Because I don’t care what anyone says or how often or winningly they say it: no one will ever, ever be able to persuade me that life is some awesome, rewarding treat. Because, here is the truth: life is catastrophe.
And yet the reader may see Theo in a different light, as a man who has lived through an intensely rich existence and experienced both miracle and coincidence.
Despite initial qualms about Theo’s voice, I was seduced by the virtuosity of the characterisation and the richness of the story as it plays around the image of the goldfinch embodied in Theo’s talisman – a painting that was his mother’s – a symbol of the soul, sacrifice, death and resurrection. This is a magnificent and luscious novel with an ultimately compelling voice and a complex story and I would rate it as the best book I have read in the past year.
Donna Tartt The Goldfinch Little, Brown 2013 PB 784pp $32.99
Michael Jongen is a librarian who tweets as @michael_jongen and microblogs at larrythelibrarian.tumblr.com
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