Gene Schmidt's Reviews > The Goldfinch

This was a huge disappointment for me. The opening New York sections were excellent, the description of the museum bombing and the whole Mansfield Park thing Tartt has going with Theo and the Barbour family, all of this works beautifully. I was excited to keep on reading to see where it all ended up, but once things move to Las Vegas the story takes a seriously wrong turn. I seem to be a minority opinion here, but there you have it. I do remember sitting up all night in 1992 reading The Secret History. But this is something else...

I have to wonder for whom Tartt thinks she's writing. Does she really imagine that intelligent adult readers are going to be enthralled with hundreds of pages detailing the antics of a pair of burned-out druggie teenagers who spend their time smoking weed, swilling vodka, and dining on packets of sugar and whatever junk food delicacies they can boost from the local supermarket? Well, perhaps they will, the book *is* on the NYT besteller list. But once all the hype and interviews die down...who knows?

The comparisons to Dickens are particularly inappropriate. Dickens wrote about orphans and other unfortunates who are on the receiving end of undeserved bad luck, but his characters struggle *against* degradation and dissipation. Poor little Joe the crossing sweeper sleeps in Tom All Alone's because he has no other choice. But here Theo and Boris revel in their squalor and dissipation . (Boris is the kind of character who seems to exist only in books and movies: the burn-out loser druggie who is failing all his classes in school but is really a secret genius who reads Dostoevsky and Thoreau in his rare sober and lucid moments. Yeah...right. I've been to high school. Burn outs are burn outs).

Nor is there any hint of Dickens' rollicking and life-affirming humor in the book. In fact there is no humor of any kind whatsoever (at least not as far as I read). Not a drop of wit. No one even cracks a halfway decent dirty joke.

And then there is Theo's father, an inveterate gambler deep into the loan sharks, and his aging sexpot girlfriend Xandra...both potentially interesting characters, except they are presented in one-dimensional terms throughout their stay in the novel, and really exist for no other purpose than to end up the way they do (at least in the case of Theo's dad). Wasted opportunity.

Too bad. I gave up halfway though the book. There is just such an incredible ugliness about all (or almost all) of the characters that I found I didn't care a damn what happened to them and certainly didn't want to spend any more time with them. The ironic part is that Tartt is an incredible writer, a master of descriptive prose, attentive to detail and able to create a truly believable world on the page. Too bad it's such a rotten world.