The Goldfinch: Such a Little Bird, Such a Big Success

Friday I started reading Donna Tartt's The Goldfinch, and I finished the 771 pages on Wednesday evening. That's the fastest I've read a book in some time, which is an indicator of just how engrossing the book is.

There are a lot of nods toward the world s we know it in the story: the precipitating event is a terrorist attack (by whom we never learn) on a great art museum in New York City.  Theodore Decker's mother is killed in the blast, and he is set adrift in the world.  His father has disappeared, his grandparents don't want him, and he is taken in gracefully if reluctantly by the family of a school friend.  A painting The Goldfinch by the 17th century Dutch artist Fabritius is his only ballast: a dying old man incites him to take it, apparently to rescue it from the post-blast fire which seems likely to engulf it.

Sounds rather Dickensian, and, indeed,  the book is full of detail, plot and coincidences in the rousing 19th century tradition.  But there is also much that is purely 21st century anomie described in prose that sings. Just as Fabritius made a masterpiece in the form of a small painting of a tiny bird, Tartt raises a drug-filled mystery (I was reminded of Steig Larsson's trilogy), to something quite beyond genre fiction.