The Goldfinch

 

My favourite read so far this summer was Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch, the story of a young boy, Theo, caught in a terrorist attack in the Metropolitan Museum. While Theo’s mother is killed, Theo escapes from the museum unhurt, and with a famous and beautiful Dutch painting, The Goldfinch, intending to save it. The shock of losing his mother and the quick hand of social services quickly unravels Theo’s life. He lives first with the wealthy Barbour family on the Upper East Side until his reckless, gambling, conniving father returns to take him to live in the outer suburbs of Las Vegas, a subdivision so new the desert threatens to take it over, and so unlived in it’s not serviced by street lights or garbage removal.

 

 

The underlying sense of doom the father casts of the story, both physically in his gambling and poor character, and also as a hereditary shadow- the young Theo worries he’ll become like his father, make this book a tremendous page-turner. However, what really makes this book hard to put down, is the ill sense of danger of Theo’s need to keep the painting and his desire to return it without being incriminated for art theft. Like most secrets left to fester, the problem of the painting grows larger and larger until it explodes in Theo’s life.

 

Lest The Goldfinch sound like too much of a pot-boiler, Tartt also writes beautifully detailed prose, with characters I adore. My favourite, Boris, is Theo’s best friend in Las Vegas, a Russian emigrant who has lived all over the world with his hard-drinking, negligent and occasionally violent father. Boris is a great linguist, conniver and consumer of alcohol and drugs of all kinds. When he returns later in the story, with dramatic consequences for both Theo and The Goldfinch painting, I had to pause a moment and marvel at the architecture of the novel that was both so exhilarating and so satisfying.