The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
The Goldfinch is fantastic. Long and worth it. Particularly if you’re sentimentally vulnerable to deep musings on art.
There’s a minor flaw, in that the two main sections aren’t very obviously connected. (The first section is “Will Theo find a stable living situation?” and the second is “Will Theo’s problems wreck his life?”) At the end of the first section, every real problem has been resolved. Except for the painting; but it’s very possible, especially in the first section, to imagine the author never resolving it. This is a coming-of-age novel, not a heist flick. So when the second section starts, it’s not clear what connection it has with the first. So that we’re halfway through the book, and we don’t know what to care about, or what the important open questions are.
But that’s the only flaw, as far as I can tell. So if you get to the middle of the book and lose interest, don’t give up! Press on.
You can learn a cool novelist’s plot trick from this: When you’re constructing your characters, you want them to mean something, so that they can contribute to the overall meaning of the novel. But you also have to throw rocks at your protagonist. In a coming of age novel, that means taking things away from them. This is the cool trick: there are only three things Tartt doesn’t take away from Theo (the Barbours, Hobie and Boris) and they represent the three major poles of meaning in the story.
(Each has a purer mirror image, and those do get taken away: Kitsey is the purer form of the Barbours as a whole; Pippa is the purer form of Hobie; and Theo’s dad is the purer form of Boris. Just to demonstrate that the author is willing to take away absolutely anything, no matter what it represents.)
The enemy is the destructive pull of beauty. The Barbours represent ignoring that pull, and how you react to it by resisting it (not the dad; he’s what they’re reacting against). Boris represents succumbing totally to it. And Hobie represents a kind of middle way, where you live with it by working with it. Rather than passive resistance or passive acceptance, active engagement. Beauty is like fire. Don’t jump into it. Don’t put it out. Build a hearth around it. Put Hobie’s antique shop around it.
What I’m trying to say is that, when you’re throwing rocks at your protagonist, be careful not to damage the symbolic structure of your novel. This is the craft lesson that Tartt’s impeccable plotting can teach.