The Goldfinch Review

The Goldfinch is a Bildungsroman with a modern, ambiguous, stylized moral. It is the epic tale of the destruction and redemption of a psyche — not so much a life story but a psychological saga — told with the modern trappings of terrorism and addiction and fractured families and art theft. Its setting — more than New York, Las Vegas, Amsterdam, or any of the other places mentioned in the book — is in the mind of the protagonist: a landscape of confusing emotions, unending self-talk, and identity crises. And it’s all told in a vividly-descriptive-sentence-fragment style. Think Robert Ludlum (international organized crime) meets Cormac McCarthy (vivid staccato sentences) meets Fyodor Dostoyevky (very long, very involved, often chasing philosophical rabbit trails.)

The book’s two great strengths are its prose and its postmodern sermonizing.
It is written in a unique and gripping voice — a compelling tug of words that describes and emotes in equal measure. But in my opinion that style lost its freshness long before the story ended. Often poetic, the prose became like the meter of a poem. I came to expect it, even anticipate the words (“lurid” and “disorienting” seemed to work in every third sentence or so). I suppose though, any style of prose gets tired after 775 pages.

The book’s second great strength — and honestly the thing that rescued it from the abyss for me — is the last-chapter-philosophizing. After 696 pages, Tartt has earned the right to an extended conclusion — a reminiscence on the meaning of life and art and her protagonist’s point of view — and she takes full advantage of it. The final chapter is 81 pages in which nothing at all happens but the protagonist’s recollection of pithy conversations and darkly veiled lessons about God, truth, mystery, art, love, fate, chance, karma, and suffering. Those lessons are beautiful and compelling without ever actually declaring any of those themes to be good, bad or even real. Tartt finds a way of naming what is true without saying it’s true; of resonating without striking a note. Unexpectedly, I found myself really enjoying these passages — smiling for the first time in 200 pages.

In a sense, The Goldfinch is a cautionary tale that delivers the only moral available to a 21st Century Western culture: life is catastrophe, but there are good days too. You can rob the catastrophe by making more of the good days. And that’s about all you can hope for.

Maybe this is a lesson of deep wisdom of which King Solomon would approve: everything is meaningless, a chasing after the wind. So enjoy your life and make a few good days amidst the catastrophe. Maybe this is the best we can hope for in the catastrophically broken world we live in. Maybe our wisest hope is for lives of joyous defiance against the evil, broken systems of a fallen kingdom.

Or maybe this is a lesson to reject. Maybe, despite its 775 pages, The Goldfinch is short and shortsighted when set against the larger story of mankind. Maybe The Goldfinch’s deepest lesson is in its temporality, its highest value as a foil for the larger, truer, more hopeful story of redemption.

The plot itself isn’t worth the ride, so The Goldfinch leaves the reader pondering the meaning of the protagonist’s harrowing story and questioning whether to accept his conclusion.

I haven’t said many positive things about the book. I did like it; didn’t love it. I thought it could have been much shorter. I found it interesting, entertaining but not in an amusing sort of way, thought-provoking, and believable in an emotional sense if not in a yeah-that-coincidence-is-not-too-far-fetched sense. If you like long books, epics, literary fiction — and if you’re comfortable with blank postmodern morality tales — I recommend it.