Michael Finocchiaro's Reviews > The Goldfinch

This was an exciting book and despite being nearly 900 pages long, was quite a page-turner. The characters were all drawn realistically and with all their flaws (with the possible exception of Hobie who was a lovable sweetheart!) The protagonist, Theo is also our narrator and is fairly reliable as he doesn't hold anything back - even his own many faults. The external narrative is on the fate of the painting The Goldfinch by Fabritius (about which we learn its own turbulent history and extreme genius throughout the narrative) following the explosion on page 34 and how this impacted Theo's life. The painting actually plays a very background position over most of the narrative and only comes centerstage again at the end of the book. Theo makes a lot of poor choices - unfortunately his father's sleazy girlfriend Xandra was right that he is far more like his father than he is willing to admit and yet in some of the best passages in the book, towards the end where Boris talks about Dosto's The Idiot:

Maybe sometimes - the wrong way is the right way! You can take the wrong path and it still comes out where you want to be? Or, spin it another way, sometimes you can do everything wrong and it still turns out to be right.

We know that despite Theo's tendency towards his dad, he is nonetheless a more genuine person and that Boris with all his external show of bravado - and of course his one big betrayal of Theo - he turns out to also to precisely the surprising but right thing in the end.

It is to Tartt's credit that the book contained so much detail (and none of it boring or pedantic) about furniture, art, and literature (driving me crazy I cannot place the turning point scene in La Recherche between Swann and Odette that she refers to) which added a lot more depth and interest to the book. Personally, I think the length was fine - she had a lot of story to tell and did an excellent job telling.

I love at the end also where Theo is traveling and tells us that one of the lessons he learned from Hobie was:

...those images that strike the heart and set it blooming like a flower, images that open up some much, much larger beauty that you can spend your whole life looking for and never find.

I found that to be a beautiful image and full of truth - like Plato's cave. Yet, another apt and thought-provoking insight from this rich and thought-provoking masterpiece. This was one time that the Pulitzer nailed it.

On a side note, I made my own trek to the Mauritshuis museum in Den Haag years ago when reading Proust to see Vermeer's View of Delft and the Girl with the Pearl Earring but either the painting was traveling or I drifted right past it towards Rembrandt. Guess I need to return to the Hague!

Her other two books were good, but this one was the best.

I was in Den Haag at the wonderful Mauritshuis Museum and saw (again) the original Fabritius painting - absolutely stunning. Interesting tidbit: months after painting The Goldfinch, the artist and most of his work was blown up when the building his studio was in exploded.

The film for this book is just coming out, hopefully, it will do the book some justice. And apparently, it was terrible. Oh well.

On a second read, the book was just as awesome. Definitely one of my favorite books of the 2010s and the best Pulitzer winner of that decade!