Book Review: The Goldfinch

Book: The Goldfinch
Author: Donna Tartt
Publisher: Hachette
Pages: 784
Price: Rs799

It is good to know, before embarking on a dazzling, 800 page long novel, that its author does not shy away from imposing impossible pain and distress on her characters. While there is exploration of art, antiques, drugs, and teenage ennui, that’s a lot of pages to spend in the company of a hero that is in various stages of post traumatic shock, grief, loss, and depression — just to pick some of the emotions that are so richly investigated in The Goldfinch in classic Donna Tartt style.

She is both master storyteller and architect of misery. To read a Donna Tartt book is to go through the Emergency Room of the mind — there is blood, guts, and broken bones to contend with before one can walk out shakily, somehow, metaphysically the better for it. Her debut novel, The Secret History, published in 1992, established something of a cult following, with its searing examination of teen friendship gone bad, leaving a dead teen in the bargain. Fans waited a decade for her next book The Little Friend, which opened with the brutal encounter of a nine-year-old-boy, strung up on a tree. The Goldfinch comes nearly a decade later and in Donna Tartt style unleashes a world of pain on its 13-year-old hero, Theo.

Theo and his mother are the world to each other once his gambler-alcoholic father clears out of their rent-controlled New York apartment. The rain one morning has them ducking into the Metropolitan Museum where Theo’s mother’s favourite painting, The Goldfinch, is displayed.

A young red head named Pippa and her grandfather have Theo distracted when a bomb goes off in the museum, killing his mother, Pippa’s grandfather, and several others. By the time the smoke clears a traumatised and delirious Theo has made his faltering way out with The Goldfinch, a 17th century painting by Fabritius, tucked under his arm, on an odd commission by the dying grandfather to keep it safe. The rest of Theo’s life is stained by the obsession he has with keeping the priceless artefact safe and hidden.

More or less an orphan of the state, Theo is taken in by his oddball friend’s wealthy parents and floats through several months dealing with grief, fielding school teachers and welfare officers, and navigating the posh, detached environment of his new home. Theo develops a friendship with Hobbie, an antique dealer, who is Pippa’s grandfather’s business partner, and eventually grows up to replace the deceased grandfather.

But first he is whisked away to a bizarre empty mansion in Las Vegas to live with his deadbeat father and his tattooed cocaine-snorting girlfriend Xandra. Here Theo forms the kind of passionate, intense, make-or-break friendship that only dawns once and in adolescence, with an equally neglected knocked-about stray named Boris. It’s not long before drugs in all their glittery variety take a hold of Theo and Boris.
Saturated with up close and personal encounters of every conceivable drug that can give him a high, and always teetering on the verge of criminality with Boris — a fine balance that tips, in the favour of a real international gangster-style shoot-out, at the end of the book — Theo loses all the bright-eyed potential he had as a young boy and turns into the kind of adult he might well have despised had his circumstances been different.

The Latin translation of the Greek aphorism goes that life is short and art long — that sentiment is echoed in this novel, and also turns a darker shade. The painting of The Goldfinch shimmers through the picaresque adventures of Theo ever since he comes in contact with it. There are portions of Theo’s life where the painting’s hold recedes but it remains the single most compelling part of his history and motivates most of his actions. Tartt establishes a circular nature to things in her novel: the actual painting titled The Goldfinch survived a dreadful gunpowder explosion in 1654 that killed its painter, and once again the painting seems poised to take the sanity and life of young Theo as well.  The old New York friends that Theo stayed with immediately after his mother’s death resurface at the end of the novel to represent a different kind of homecoming. There is also circularity in that the incident at the Metropolitan Museum is never really left behind. Theo is a moth to the flame when it comes to Pippa, the one person in the world who has shared both his loss and his journey.

The Goldfinch is an overpowering book strong enough to be a drug in itself. Tartt engulfs the reader in a swirl of hallucinations, art crime, antiques, adolescent angst, romance, and loss, and never loses sight of the big questions about life and ethics that dominate all her books.