The Goldfinch

Donna Tartt spent eleven years writing The Goldfinch, as she had spent eleven years writing The Little Friend before it, and the decade-plus gestation is visible in the book: it is dense, novelistically ambitious, occasionally over-furnished, and alive in ways that more efficiently produced fiction often is not. It won the Pulitzer Prize in 2014 and was immediately caught in a critical crossfire-praised as a magnificent popular novel, dismissed as a middlebrow doorstop dressed in literary clothing. The truth, as usual, is more interesting than either verdict.

The novel follows Theo Decker from thirteen years old, when a museum bombing kills his mother, through his twenties, tracing a trajectory from grief to petty crime to the antiques trade to Amsterdam to near-destruction. The painting of the title-Carel Fabritius’s tiny masterpiece “The Goldfinch,” which Theo takes from the museum wreckage and carries through his life as a talisman of loss-gives the novel its emotional and philosophical center: the question of what art can do for grief, whether beauty is consolation or accusation.

Tartt’s prose is her greatest asset: rich, propulsive, alert to the visual and sensory textures of objects and spaces. She renders period New York, a Nevada suburb, and Amsterdam with equal conviction, and her rendering of the antiques business-its ethics, its taxonomies, its pleasures-has the authority of someone who has gone deep. Boris, Theo’s Ukrainian friend from his desert adolescence, is one of contemporary fiction’s most vital supporting characters: disreputable, loyal, philosophically challenging, permanently memorable.

Where the novel strains is in its final pages, where Tartt attempts to philosophically justify the novel’s aesthetic premises. The argument is both too explicit and not quite convincing. But the journey to that ending is worth taking.