For most people, there's something mysterious about visiting an art gallery. It's a place where one stares at paintings and tries to understand what they mean. In Donna Tartt's "The Goldfinch," the concept gets uprooted with one of the most firecracker premises imaginable, finding a childhood tragedy paving the way for a mix of intellectual pursuits and juvenile pleasures. The results create a fantastic character study that explores the variables that make someone who they are. As a lengthy read, it maneuvers some unexpected corners and results in a book that starts perfectly in its provocation before becoming something more pulpy and less thrilling. As a result, it's a great book that loses steam by the end, though it's a nice fit for the protagonist, whose journey is anything but conventional.
"The Goldfinch" is rarely as good as in its opening chapter. The whole moment is designed to be this last moment of innocence, where a mother-son bond on the way to an art exhibit reveals everything that one would need to know about them. There is a preciousness, an embrace of knowledge that makes you believe that if the story continued this way, that things would be okay. Instead, as overlooking a painting called The Goldfinch, a tragedy occurs that rips them apart, leaving him to steal the painting as a final reminder of her. It's not entirely clear why, but it comes to mean everything to him. Even as he survives and moves onto a variety of colorful family members, this dread lingers over him. He's an art thief and while he's able to grow as a person, his moral conscience continues to get consumed by the fear of his life being uprooted.
Decades pass by and he meets less upstanding people as friends. His initial obsession with knowledge suddenly gives way to drug addiction and various dysfunctional relationships via his Las Vegas-bound father. The narrative muddles and soon the book evolves from this heartbreaking character study into a firecracker mystery of life crumbling in on him. What starts as sympathetic shifts into animosity, where the paranoid energy feels rattled for dozens of pages at a time. With that said, the shift in tone may be fitting for the piece Tartt is telling, but ultimately sacrifices any satisfying momentum and character shifts in favor of a more conventional, instantaneous thrill ride. It works, but by the end the story is far removed from the emotional core that made it resonate that it's best viewed as a mess that never quite gets where it needs to go.
Overall "The Goldfinch" has some of the best prose that one could want on the subject of art and pathos. .The opening chapters have one of the greatest examples of a character being uprooted and the isolation that comes with that. However, there's something tragic when that behavior becomes assimilated and it's less about the emotional survival of an orphan and more about the effort to keep an inevitable secret from coming out. How will one want that piece of their life to slip away without any potential problem emerging? Overall Tartt has a lot on her mind and the results are at times brilliant, but the third act shift is a bit too much that makes it impersonal and struggles to connect with what made it appealing in the first place.
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