The Goldfinch

There is a Claude Monet painting in the collection of San Francisco’s Palace of the Legion of Honor that I’ve been in love with for most of my life.  When I lived in SF I would sometimes go to the museum for the sole purpose (to the exclusion of anything else) of standing in front of it for 15 or 20 minutes.  It is magnificent and even way back then I plotted a strategy to save it if and when the next major earthquake hit.  My strategy even included my escape route, physically difficult but doable.  It’s a big painting and it would be problematic for that reason alone but also there is the matter of keeping it safe under horrible conditions of several kinds, not the least of which would be getting shot as a looter for my altruistic pains.  Honest, you guys, don’t shoot!  I just want to save it for all of mankind and I will return it just as soon as possible.  Well, I might hang it on the wall over my mantel for a few days and of course I would keep it at safe temperature and humidity levels.
 
Even then I thought it would be a pretty good plot for a novel and, although I intended to make it a thriller, I would still be able to wax poetic about art in general and Monet in particular.  But, of course, the idea never got past the back of my eyeballs.
 
Donna Tartt, in her new book "The Goldfinch" has almost usurped my general idea and has made it her own.  As it happens, The Goldfinch is an Old Dutch masters painting by Carel Fabritius (he was a pupil of Rembrandt’s and a tutor of Vermeer’s) that, through horrible circumstances, comes into the possession of a 12-year-old boy.  The story follows this child, and this painting, through harrowing shit and, I thought (from the day I read the first review), what a great, I mean great! idea.  And Ms. Tartt even gets to wax poetic about art in general and the little painting in particular.  The book reaped raves from some prominent reviewers and has become a best seller.
 

Although the book is fascinating and starts with a bang I’m afraid I’m not a huge fan.  Our young hero starts out as a charming, likable misfit and you fall for him early.  Unfortunately, he starts to age and he pretty much turns into an awful teenager and then, ugh, an adult with zero morality.  In real life you might forgive him for his trespasses because of the tragedies visited upon him, but in fiction you need to (at least I do) love your protagonist, not just understand why he’s an asshole.  And I could have skipped the on-going tutorial about the minutia of drug use.

 

I figure Theo is about 27 at the conclusion of the novel, which ends with another bang but, although he cleans himself up, he barely redeems himself in my eyes (and heart).  Ms. Tartt wraps up her loose ends pretty well and then, oh horrors, the waxing begins, ad nauseam.  Her philosophizing grows old and there was way too much word play (“shock and aura” for god’s sake!) as she makes her bid for relevant “literature.”  I didn’t like being preached to, or rather maybe lectured at (she even addresses us, her dear readers, directly), and I just wish she had foregone that last 20 pages of her conclusion.  Oh, I liked the book well enough; most of it, but it would have been a major coup de literature if it had come in at about 571 pages, rather than the 771 her editors allowed.