Have you ever had the experience of finishing a book and feeling as if you will never find another one that remotely measures up? That’s how I felt when I got to the end of The Goldfinch. I’ve read some excellent novels in the past year – Trollope’s Barchester series, Kate Atkinson’s Life after Life, Jane Gardam’s Old Filth, The Luminaries, to name but a few. But Donna Tartt has blown them all out of the water.
This is the story of a lost painting and a lost boy. Not that the painting is really lost, though it’s lost in the eyes of the world. Nor is the boy really lost in the sense you might think, but after the death of his beloved mother Theo Decker loses his centre, his grasp, his balance. Suffering from undiagnosed PTSD, passed from home to unsatisfactory home, taking refuge from his pain in alcohol and drugs, Theo leads a life that sometimes becomes almost unbearably painful to read about. But what Theo never loses is his ability to love – after a fashion, anyway – and his appreciation of beauty.
When in doubt, what to do? How do we know what’s right for us? Every shrink, every career counseler, every Disney princess knows the answer. Be yourself, follow your heart. Only, here’s what I really, really want someone to explain to me. What if one happens to be possessed of a heart that can’t be trusted? What if the heart, for its own, unfathomable reasons, leads one wilfully, and in a cloud of unspeakable radiance, away from health, domesticity, civic responsibility and strong social connections, all the blandly held common virtues, and instead towards a beautiful flare of ruin, self immolation, disaster? If your deepest self is coaxing you toward the bonfire, is it better to turn away, stop your ears with wax, ignore all the perverse glory your heart is screaming at you? Or is it better to throw yourself, head first and laughing, into the holy rage that is calling your name?
Between reality on the one hand, and the point where the mind strikes reality, there’s a middle zone, a rainbow edge, where beauty comes into being, where two different surfaces mingle and blur and provide what life does not, and this is the space where all art exists, and all magic, and I would argue as well, all love.
This seems to me to be a really important novel, one I look forward to re-reading, and certainly one I will never forget.
Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch (Abacus: London, 2014). 978-0349139630, 880 pp., paperback.
I keep seeing this in bookshops but haven’t picked it up yet. This review is enough to push me over the edge!
Please do take the plunge — and I hope you love it as much as I did.
>>Have you ever had the experience of finishing a book and feeling as if you will never find another one that remotely measures up?
Yes yes yes! I am SO familiar with this feeling. There are some books that I respond to this way no matter how many times I read them — like Jane Eyre — and I’ve had to come up with books to read right after Jane Eyre to start letting me down easy from my bookish hangover.
I love that idea Jenny — books lined up for an easy let-down!
“Have you ever had the experience of finishing a book and feeling as if you will never find another one that remotely measures up? ” I felt the same! It was just so beautifully written, so wonderfully crafted.
Glad you agree Alice. It is an amazing novel.
I’m dying to read this book, but I will definitely need at least a month to get through it. I also never buy hardback books (too expensive), but I think I will buy this book in hardback. The cover is one of the most beautiful I’ve ever seen.
Yes Fariba I have it in hardback and I’m glad of it, as it will be able to stand up to the re-readings it is certainly going to get!
I agree – I thought this was an astonishing novel and read most of it in one burst on a twelve hour flight. I didn’t want it to end, not so much because of the plot but because of the quality of the writing and the brilliant characterisation. Tartt seems to have the ability to invest even very minor characters with extraordinary vitality.
A wonderful, wonderful book! As a longtime fan of Donna Tartt, I rushed to the bookstore to buy my copy as soon as it was released and read it in 2 days flat. I recently re-read sections of ‘The Goldfinch’ before and after visiting the Mauritshuis, Den Haag, to view the painting. I don’t think that I’ve ever read as tender, moving and beautiful writing about a painting than in this book. Seeing the painting, I realised afresh just how masterful a storyteller and artist Tartt is. Definitely a book to read again, and again.
I’d love to see the painting! and I’m impressed with your 2-day read. But so agree about the re-reading.