I confess I was nervous about
reading Donna Tartt's third novel, The
Goldfinch. So nervous, in fact, that I put it off as long as possible. It
wasn't the length (780+ pages) or that I didn't want to read it. I did. It was just that, like many others, I'd
loved The Secret History with a
passion, reading it, head down, walking along the street, missing tube stops,
ignoring colleagues' greetings, quite literally narrowly avoiding an
altercation with a lamp-post. Again, like many others, I waited ten years for a
follow up. When Little Friend
arrived, I devoured it. Or tried to. Some scenes still stick in my mind, images
conjured as vividly as if from my own life, but, in the main, I struggled,
crawling towards what passed for the climax.
And so, ten years further on, I
hedged around The Goldfinch for
weeks. Terrified it would be more Little
Friend than Secret History.
Skirting it, engaging in a complicated dance, putting it down, picking it up,
lured eventually by the thriller-like prologue, set in Amsterdam some fourteen
years after the death of Theodore Decker's mother. Tartt has never flinched
from seemingly giving the plot away on the first page - she did so in The Secret History, and she does so
here.
From Amsterdam, where Theo
(somehow he is not and never will be Decker, or even Theodore), Tartt plunges
us back to the day Theo's art-loving mother died (in a terrorist explosion at
the Metropolitan Museum of art). It is not so much this bomb that alters the
course of Theo's life, but its immediate aftermath. Coming to in the wreckage,
he comforts a dying man who exhorts him to save the valuable work of art his
mother was showing him minutes before the explosion, The Goldfinch (a real
painting by Fabritius, a student of Rembrandt who also died in an explosion in
1654). This act and Welty, the dying man who prompted it, set Theo on a
trajectory from the privileged apartments of the upper east side to Las Vegas,
and the barren deserts that surround it, with his gambler father. There he
meets Boris - a wonderful character but the kind of best friend his mother
would have crossed a continent to avoid - before a memorable greyhound ride
back to Greenwich village and eventually on to Europe. His mother's ghost, his
growing addiction and his obsession with the stolen painting haunting his every
step.
There is much more to say, more
wonderful vivid characters to celebrate - frail redhead Pippa,
antique-restoring father figure Hobie, Theo's ill-fated childhood friend Andy
Barbour - but I will leave you to encounter them for yourself as all good
storytellers should. For this is what Tartt is, first and foremost, a
storyteller. Comparisons with Dickens started with Stephen King's review in the
New York Times and they have gathered
pace since. Oliver Twist, David Copperfield and Great Expectations chief
amongst them. And they are not overblown.
In spring this year, a furore
broke out over wikipedia's definition of Great American Novelists - it was, of
course, a list of Great American male novelists. No Harper Lee, no Flannery
O'Connor, no Mary McCarthy... no Donna Tartt. With this, her third work,
clearly a labour of love, Tartt has surely secured her place on any subsequent
list. The Goldfinch is truly a great novel. That it is American is almost
beside the point.
The Goldfinch
by Donna Tartt is 2-1 favourite to win the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction on wednesday. It is out in paperback on thursday.
(This piece was first published on Bazaar on Books www.harpersbazaar.co.uk on 18 October 2013)
(This piece was first published on Bazaar on Books www.harpersbazaar.co.uk on 18 October 2013)
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