By Donna Tartt
I read this over three days in mid-October 2024, while I was in Japan.
Dear god. I couldn’t put it down, I was absolutely hooked from the first page. It’s an absolutely gorgeously-written book, sumptuous, dazzling. Tartt does like her tricolons, and her descriptions become a bit samey, and I’m convinced she’s never seen a number in her life (in many ways it’s similar to Secret History), but all of that pales in comparison to the immensity and scope.
The story covers Theo, right from when he’s a young boy with a mother he adores, through an explosion when they’re at a museum which kills her, to his temporary foster care with a rich friend, a spell in Las Vegas with his alcoholic gambling dad, a return to New York to stay with an old man he met who works as a furniture restorer, his career as an antiques dealer, his engagement, and his love for a girl he met at the museum all that time ago, but all of this swirls around a single, tiny, dazzling painting: Fabritius’ Goldfinch, which he takes from the museum near the start of the book, and is returned at the end, and which gives meaning to every word and action.
The characterisation, the settings, the descriptions, the lush asides and flashbacks, the plot complications, the exposition and philosophising; it’s the world made more intense and startling, more windswept and rainy, more drenched with meaning and symbolism. The book is a dense, self-contained lode which bends your thought towards it. Utterly beautiful.