About.com Rating

Little, Brown and Company, 2013

The Goldfinch (view an interactive storyline of The Goldfinch), Donna Tartt's riveting tale of love and loss, revolves around the life of Theo Decker who, at the opening of the novel, is 13-years-old and living with his newly-single mother in New York City. Theo and his mother Audrey are at the Metropolitan Museum of Art during a terrorist bombing that kills  Audrey.

In the rubble, Theo crawls over to a dying man who hands him a ring and asks him to please get it to his partner. Theo takes the ring – but that’s not all. He takes a priceless painting, as well.

"The Goldfinch," by Carel Fabritius, a student of Rembrandt and teacher of Vermeer, is a painting of  a bird held captive by a chain around his leg. When Theo looks up and sees the painting – one of the only ones not destroyed by the explosion – he grabs it without thinking. For the years that follow in this epic novel, the painting is the haunting and driving force in Theo’s life. Theo, too, is chained down and restricted by the memory of his mother and the guilt he feels when thinking about the “what if?” What if I didn’t get suspended? What if I convinced my mom not to stop?

Without any other real family, Theo finds himself homeless after the explosion. The family of a close, rich friend offers to take him in temporarily in their Park Avenue apartment, but when social workers finally track down his father in Las Vegas, Theo is shipped off to live with him and his young girlfriend.

Painting in tow, Theo is thrown into a fast-paced, drug-addled lifestyle. He meets Boris, a Russian immigrant with no family life to speak of, and the two boys find themselves smoking pot and drinking vodka to oblivion on most afternoons.

Circumstances eventually land Theo back in New York City, working with antiques and falling into a crooked lifestyle, like his father, despite trying to create some semblance of a real life with the weight of his mother’s death on his shoulders. And after meeting Boris again decades later, Theo is dragged into something out of an action movie.

The Goldfinch is very carefully thought out and painstakingly developed; it sprawls over almost three decades, and Tartt leaves no loose ends. It touches on topics both antiquated (old, dusty, antique furniture being repaired and sold) and contemporary (the use of emojis and acronyms, for example, in text messages).

The novel is split into five parts, and the final part begins with a quote by Nietzsche: “We have art in order not to die from the truth.” This precisely describes Theo’s relationship with the painting: as long as he still has it, he holds a connection to his dead mother. The painting allows him to not have to fully grieve. Fabritius, as his mother explains before her death, is the “missing link” between Rembrandt and Vermeer, as the painting serves as the missing link between Theo and his mother.

Despite the 771 page count, the novel seems like an exercise in restraint, as is any odyssey. Tartt perfectly understands where to elaborate and where to pull back, resulting in a heartbreaking tale about the difficulty of moving on in the wake of a tragedy.



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