The Goldfinch won a Pulitzer and it sucks

or, a neo-Victorian novel about being a dirtbag in New York

Spoilers and spite ahead.

I don’t often put my thesis statement in the title but I don’t want to leave any confusion here. This book is terrible.

I went in knowing literally nothing about the book, which is honestly how I go into a lot of books. I’m not one of those weak souls who’s terrified of spoilers or anything like that, but I usually don’t need to know anything about a novel to give it a chance. The fact that it’s an award-winning novel is often enough for me to at least pick it up from the library.

That’s how I got here. And in service of keeping you from making my same mistake, I’m here to tell you that this book is definitely not worth your time. More than that, it’s not even worth your library card’s time.

or, Intrigue!

The novel begins engaging enough, though I’ll tell you now: I hate books about New York for two reasons:

1. New York sucks

2. Because I’m an idiot who reads a lot of books, I have been reading about New York since my brain was the consistency of pancake batter and I have already memorized every street name and every story about young sensitive people with too much money and not enough sense.

Honestly, if you’re going to write a novel set in New York or if you’ve already written it or if you’re writing it now, change the setting. Even keep all the details identical but just say it’s taking place in Indianapolis. Don’t even edit out the many inevitable references to Brooklyn or subways rides. Just say that all of this is happening in Indianapolis and when anyone asks why Indianapolis sounds exactly like New York, just say it’s science fiction and stare at them without blinking until they’re like, “Uh, yeah, I get it.”

But because I didn’t bother learning even a single thing about the novel before starting, I didn’t hold this against it. Instead I just powered through, which is pretty easy because Tartt is a fantastic writer of a certain type of scene. The language and voice carry you along, lulling you into a sort of stupor so you don’t even care that part of you is wondering if this is just Catcher in the Rye for the 21st Century.

And then the bombs go off.

I really cannot describe how shocking this was to me. It felt like a rather mundane literary novel got invaded by a thriller and when you asked what the hell just happened the novel was just like, “Get on board, fella: we’re barreling to hell!”

When you’re on a rollercoaster, you may as well throw your hands in the air when it plummets back down to earth.

The chaos of the moment causes our young narrator, Theo, to steal The Goldfinch, a very famous and very expensive painting and take it home after being unable to find his mother.

The next hundred or so page deal with the fallout of this event. Theo is taken in by an excessively wealthy family. His former best friend is the son of this family. We get a lot of great interactions and relationships built. The effortless power of this section allows her to flex the novel quite a bit. And even though I think it mostly leads to disaster, it kept me reading because of how well the foundation of the novel is laid.

I really have to say: the first quarter or so of this book is just fantastic. It’s the perfect omelette.

It’s also a Victorian novel.

or, the Ruined cathedral

A growing disquiet brewing inside me for months has made the following question ring in my head like a gong at midnight:

What if I’ve already read all the good books?

The question is both ridiculous and potentially more accurate than I’m comfortable with. I mean, obviously there are more books out there I’ll like a whole lot. The amount of books published through history may as well be infinite, but I do think I’m already familiar with the majority of writers I will truly love in life.

I read a lot of books. Thousands of them.

If this sounds like me bragging, ask yourself if you have ever been impressed by the number of books someone’s read.

Over the last few years, I’ve had varying degrees of success with reading fiction. Often, I find many books disappointing. Even ones that win awards or all kinds of acclaim. I’ve read pretty widely across genres as well, though it’s possible Romance, that great untapped fount, holds a great deal of promise.

I’ve been dipping my toes back into the 19th Century because many old favorites live there and so it was that I ended up reading Tess of the D’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy, a novel perhaps most famous for the ways Hardy leverages culture and plot against his heroine.

Tess of D’Urbervilles is a moral novel. A brutal cultural critique. But this also makes it somewhat silly.

Many novels of the time period functioned this way. Sort of primers for behavior. Art meant to engineer society by giving people models of Right Action or at least by giving them models of Bad Behavior.

Much of this involves putting the protagonist through a lot of misery, excavating their heart and mind for the powerful emotions boiling beneath the reserved dignity of the age.

It’s a bit funny reading these old novels. Thomas Hardy is a great writer, pumping out luxurious prose and even creating masterful scenes of tension and desire. But he’ll race through years of summary so that he can capture an entire lifetime between his pages. And all that summary is largely to turn our complex characters into stock characters and/or metaphors for virtue or vice.

or, the coney island sandcastle

The novel begins to go wrong once Theo’s estranged father returns. This section is also the last memorable part of the novel. For better or worse, it also holds the key to the action driving the rest of the narrative.

Where the opening section packed itself full of character interactions and intriguing scenarios and even moments of great emotional clarity or distress, this is where Tartt begins summarizing the novel.

I’m not against summary, by the way. But when you spend 30 pages writing a conversation between two drunk teenagers but summarize moments that change a relationship between characters, we have a problem.

For example: we get a lot of Boris in this section. Structurally, this makes sense because Boris is the hinge of the whole novel.

A Brief Aside About Being a Teenage Dirtbag

As I have said before: I was an idiot. I have lived a stupid and sometimes dangerous life. My teenage years were a wash of depression, alcohol, insomnia, broken hearts and broken limbs, and a constant urge to die, to be dead, and the love shared between friends and almost lovers.

The relationship between Theo and Boris was made for me. Or, it should have been. I lived this stupid life, minus all the wealth. I was an idiot spending almost every night drunk with friends who I was so close to that the thought of being apart from them seemed worse than anything.

My friends were my family.

My relationship with my actual family has always been fraught. During high school, especially, I was very distant from my family. My family felt like six strangers forced to live together, but without all the fun and excitement of a season of The Real World. Instead it was more like six strangers trying to avoid one another in the same house.

And so I understand Theo and Boris. I was them.

The fact that this relationship did absolutely nothing for me in the book has got to be one of the biggest failings of the book. I was so predisposed to connect directly and fiercely to these characters living this deranged teenage life that Tartt didn’t even have to do much to make me feel this viscerally.

And yet!

All we get is summary for everything that matters, with so much of what matters in the novel skipped in service of…well, this is the whole problem.

or, return to the coney island sandcastle

But Theo is living with his estranged father.

Their relationship is tense and awkward and very uncomfortable. But then, seemingly at random, Theo tells the reader that his relationship has improved dramatically with his father. He then summarizes a change in feeling that happened over the course of months.

It sure would have been great to see this! Instead, we had another scene drenched in shame between Theo and Boris where they seem poised to become lovers but never do.

Of course, the reason she summarizes this change in feeling is because it doesn’t actually matter, except to the degree that it moves the plot forward. Theo and his dad become closer just so that Theo’s dad can manipulate him into handing him a big chunk of his inherited wealth (this, of course, doesn’t go through), which leads directly to the death of his father, which sends him back to New York, Boris-less.

After the time jump, we’re back into the rhythm of his life in New York and Theo’s a drug addict but mostly just an asshole.

Slowly, I came to think Tartt had done something brilliant here: she pulled us in for 400 pages with a rather mundane literary novel only to then deliver us a thrilling art heist.

Yet once again, we don’t see Theo do any of this. We see Theo talk to Hobie for dozens of pages at a time, but we don’t see Theo do anything that’s actually driving the plot.

He’s sort of on the run as a conman and forger, amassing massive amounts of wealth by lying to rich idiots.

Do we see him pull off one of these cons? Do we see him getting deeper and deeper into this predicament?

No. We’re just told that it all happened later.

The novel becomes a you-had-to-be-there story strung together by dramatic scenes of tense dialogue between characters who were very well established and important to the first 150 pages of the novel.

Beneath it all is the fact that Theo still has The Goldfinch. At this point, he believes returning it would land him in prison so it’s his deepest, darkest secret. He’s hiding from the law because of his initial crime and now, too, because of all the fraud he’s perpetrating.

While Tartt’s powers as an author are enough to keep the tension rising, the stress circling like a noose around Theo, it all feels very abstract. And then Boris comes back into the novel and it does sort of become a thriller, albeit a ridiculously dumb one, and then we finish with Theo moralizing for dozens of pages to end the novel.

or, spilled milk to the gallows

That the entire novel hinges on his theft of The Goldfinch is just stupid. When he steals the painting, it makes a sort of perfect sense. He’s in shock and not really able to think about what he’s doing. That he doesn’t immediately return it is believable enough because teenagers are notorious idiots.

But it also requires the suspension of a brain for hundreds of pages. At any point, Theo could have just thought about this for one minute and brought the painting back. Or, if he was so terrified of getting caught, he could have just left an anonymous tip and placed it where the authorities could find it.

Yes, I get it. It’s tied to the loss of his mother, but it’s also just dumb. Or, it would be less dumb if the novel remained a slice of life novel about the bored and boring and disinterested property class choking America. But instead it sort of gestures towards becoming a thriller and even walks those beats for a while.

But the biggest problem with the novel is that the emphasis is almost always pointed backwards.

Theo and Hobie talk for literally twenty pages about furniture or whatever, but we just skip everything that actually drives the novel. Whether it’s Theo’s relationship with his shitty dad or even the moment when Boris steals the painting from Theo (honestly, it really seems like this moment not being on the page is just bonkers levels of stupid) or any single moment where Theo perpetrates fraud on the unsuspecting overly wealthy clients of his and Hobie’s store, we never see any of it.

We never even see Theo’s relationship with Kitsey until they’re engaged. This is despite the fact that Kitsey is actually in a lot of the novel as a character bouncing along the periphery of the narrative.

or, you can pour ketchup on your eggs, you freak

So what are we left with?

A thousand pages of idle chatter and the tension of consequences to actions we never witnessed.

It’s just bizarre. The structure of this story makes no sense. Tartt is a master when it comes to scene construction, but I have to ask: why did you choose so many scenes that have no consequence and leave out all the scenes that matter?