Ms. Tartt has made Fabritius’s bird the MacGuffin at the center of her glorious, Dickensian novel, a novel that pulls together all her remarkable storytelling talents into a rapturous, symphonic whole and reminds the reader of the immersive, stay-up-all-night pleasures of reading … It’s a work that shows us how many emotional octaves Ms. Tartt can now reach, how seamlessly she can combine the immediate and tactile with more wide-angled concerns … Ms. Tartt is adept at harnessing all the conventions of the Dickensian novel — including startling coincidences and sudden swerves of fortune — to lend Theo’s story a stark, folk-tale dimension as well as a visceral appreciation of the randomness of life and fate’s sometimes cruel sense of humor.
The Goldfinch is a rarity that comes along perhaps half a dozen times per decade, a smartly written literary novel that connects with the heart as well as the mind. I read it with that mixture of terror and excitement I feel watching a pitcher carry a no-hitter into the late innings. You keep waiting for the wheels to fall off, but in the case of The Goldfinch, they never do … Surprisingly few novelists write well of grief, but Tartt — whose language is dense, allusive and so vivid it’s intoxicating — does it as well as it can be done … Tartt depicts the friendship of these two cast-adrift adolescent boys with a clarity of observation I would have thought next to impossible for a writer who was never part of that closed male world … The Goldfinch is a triumph with a brave theme running through it: art may addict, but art also saves us from ‘the ungainly sadness of creatures pushing and struggling to live.’
The Goldfinch is a virtual baby: it clutches and releases the most fantastical toys. Its tone, language, and story belong to children’s literature … To be fair, Tartt has considerable talents in the field of magical misdirection...but misdirection is practiced evasion, and narrative secrets are tested by the value of their revelations: we will need, as bounty, more than the prestidigitator’s ace of spades … Through all this thrashing, twisting, gulping, choking, gasping, coughing, cursing, plunging, sputtering, and floundering, I kept on trying to imagine a different novel, stripped of its unreasonable raison d’être and its childish sweets.
One of the greatest of Tartt's many gifts is her ability to assure readers that they're in the hands of a trustworthy storyteller. Her novels always feature surprising, in some cases preposterous, narrative elements, but she makes us believe them … There are bravura descriptions of landscapes and cities, shrewd dissections of human motivations and self-deceptions, convincing and sometimes very witty dialogue spoken by characters from wildly different backgrounds … For all its artfulness, and despite a satisfying and wholly unexpected denouement, The Goldfinch both describes and understands the arbitrariness of life and never makes it seem simpler or more orderly than the fascinating, troubling mess it is.
While the world has been transformed over the past decade, one of the most remarkable qualities of The Goldfinch is that it arrives singed with 9/11 terror but redolent of a 19th-century novel … This is, among many other things, a novel of survivor’s guilt, of living in ‘the generalized miasma of shame and unworthiness and being-a-burden’ … While grief may be the novel’s bassline, Theo’s wit and intelligence provide the book’s endearing melody … Free will and fate, pragmatic morality and absolute values, an authentic life and a dutiful one — those fusty old terms spring to life in an extended passage of philosophical trompe l’oeil as Theo expounds with the authority of a man who has suffered, who knows why the chained bird sings.
Throughout The Goldfinch are sections that seem like the sort of passages a novelist employs as placeholders, hastily sketched-in paragraphs to which the writer intends to go back: to sharpen the focus, to find a telling detail, to actually do the hard work of writing. If we readily grasp a scene that Tartt is setting, it’s often because her streetscapes and interiors are not merely familiar but generic...Tartt doesn’t bother to fend off clichés … Reading The Goldfinch, I found myself wondering, ‘Doesn’t anyone care how something is written anymore?’—a question I would have been less likely to ask were I reading a detective novel. But The Goldfinch is being talked about, and read, as a work of serious literary fiction.
… a long, sad, beautifully written first-person adventure for Theo and for the painting, chained together by fate … You can see echoes of The Secret History here — the poignant solitude of the young male protagonist; the long days spent drunk or high, as if time was something not just to kill, but to annihilate; the desperate attempts to squash a deed that can’t be undone … Tartt has demonstrated a remarkable ability to combine page-turning plot twists with achingly beautiful prose. You may not always like Theo, but you stay with him, remembering that this is, at heart, a boy still longing for his mother (whose character haunts the pages of this novel like a smiling ghost).
I find [Tartt] guilty, somehow, of simultaneously relying on shorthand, belaboring certain points, and generally being unconvincing. You can’t just say ‘cigarettes and ennui’ and the Red Sea parts … The Goldfinch is equally full of class markers, comical names (Kitten), kinds of antiques, and names of schools, so that the reader occasionally has the sense of being bludgeoned with a sledgehammer … The Goldfinch invites you to revel in your own snobbishness, because Mr. Decker and Xandra are actually malign forces in the text; Theo’s dad is a legitimate villain, in addition to the baseline villainy of being sprawl-living, non-public-transportation-using, and bad-food-eating … Donna Tartt is catnip for educated people who want to read entertaining but not difficult things about lofty topics and cosmopolitan people. And despite my problems with this book–that it’s big and uneven and sometimes goofy–I’m basically on board.
One of the joys of this entertaining novel is Tartt's authentic, timeless descriptions of New York City in all of its distinct beauty and loneliness … The reader follows Theo through a 14-year odyssey guided by tremendous loss and grief, all the while the legendary painting providing something of a rudder to his adventures … In the novel's homestretch, Tartt takes the reader on something of a wild international ride, but the melodrama never sends this ambitious narrative off the rails. Instead, under the assured command of the author's sturdy prose, the reader holds on and is taken deep into the downtrodden soul of Theo and the unpleasant truths that he must face.
Haunted, guilt-ridden and prone to self-endangerment — much of it centered around the painting, to which Theo clings as a symbol of his lost, beloved parent — Theo takes the reader on a fantastic journey. It's full of moral confusion, hairpin plot turns and, best of all, a vivid, rather raucous cast of characters drawn with the fond yet gimlet-eyed insight of Charles Dickens, whose spirit hovers over this book like a guardian angel … Tartt manages to deliver wistful, always wise meditations on class divisions, the contradictions of the art world, the power of memory and the randomness of fate, in which life can take all sorts of seemingly disastrous turns and yet, in true Dickensian fashion, turn out all right in the end … The result is the best book of 2013.
Tartt’s books submerge you for the duration until you emerge, blinking, in the sunlight at the end, wondering how the laundry pile got so big and just how many meals you might have missed … The Goldfinch is most often described as Dickensian, which is an apt comparison, both for the big, entertaining plot and the orphan who gets swept along on adventures … If the first half of the novel is a coming-of-age story, the second is the reckoning as Theo gets pulled into the shadowy underworld of forgery, art thieves, and organized crime...by that point, a reader is happy to follow Theo – who, like another Dickens character, most definitely is not the hero of his own life – wherever The Goldfinch flies.
Although set in the post-9/11 era, this big book is old-fashioned in the best sense of the term, combining a heartbreaking coming-of-age tale with a thrilling suspense story … While the novel is cerebral and erudite, the key characteristic that will keep you reading is its enormous heart, the evident affection and tenderness the author feels for her characters, such that the reader cannot help but care about them as well…There are a couple of romantic plot lines, but the most compelling relationship, by far, is the friendship between Theo and Boris. You will remember these indelible characters for a long time.
I feel like I've been waiting for a novel like this to appear not only since I read The Secret History, but also since I first read David Copperfield … As ingenious as Tartt's plot is, this novel would be but a massive scaffolding feat, were it not for her uncanny way with words … [Theo’s] loneliness is the realistic emotional constant in this crowded, exuberantly plotted triumph of a novel. And if that ain't ‘Dickensian,’ I don't know what is.
This novel is a veritable journey for reader and protagonist alike, and one made more pleasurable by Tartt's exquisite eye for the smallest detail … Reading The Goldfinch is like watching a drawn-out but inviting game of hot potato; painting, painting, who's got the painting? There are a few surprises, but for the most part the novel's path is clear. Not that it matters, since this isn't a mystery but more a meditation on the impermanence of life in all its guises.
