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The Goldfinch Reading Order
The Goldfinch (2013) by Donna Tartt is a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about Theo Decker, who as a thirteen-year-old boy is caught in a terrorist bombing at a New York art museum that kills his mother. In the chaos immediately after the explosion, Theo takes a small Dutch Golden Age painting — 'The Goldfinch' by Carel Fabritius (1654) — wrapping it in a jacket and carrying it out of the rubble. Over the next fifteen years, Theo carries the painting through the wreckage of his life: a stint with a wealthy family in Park Avenue, a chaotic adolescence in Las Vegas with his irresponsible father, a return to New York and an apprenticeship in an antiques restoration shop, and finally an involvement in the criminal network of art theft and forgery that the painting draws him into. The novel is partly a coming-of-age story, partly a crime thriller, partly a meditation on art, loss, beauty, and the objects that survive catastrophe, and its ambition — to be the kind of nineteenth-century novel that contains everything — was both its primary virtue and the source of the most heated critical debate about it.
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The Goldfinch (2013)
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The Goldfinch
Donna Tartt·2013
The Goldfinch — Frequently Asked Questions
What is Carel Fabritius's 'The Goldfinch' painting in the novel?
'The Goldfinch' (1654) is a real painting, a small (33.5 × 22.8 cm) oil on panel by Carel Fabritius, a Dutch Golden Age painter who was a pupil of Rembrandt and died in the Delft Powder Magazine explosion in 1654 — the year he painted 'The Goldfinch' and the same year depicted on the painting's inscription. The painting shows a small chained goldfinch on a perch against a pale ground, and its smallness and delicacy and the poignant accident of Fabritius's own early explosive death make it an ideal subject for a novel about objects that survive their makers. The painting lives at the Mauritshuis museum in the Hague, and Tartt has said she encountered it there and it gave her the novel's central image and its title.
Why was The Goldfinch so critically divisive?
The Goldfinch won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and became a massive bestseller, but it also attracted some of the most hostile criticism of any prize-winning novel in recent memory. Critics who disliked the novel objected primarily to its length (771 pages), its sentimentality, what they saw as the incoherence of its final philosophical statement (a long speech by Hobie about art and survival), and the unevenness of its prose across its different sections. Francine Prose's review in the New York Review of Books, which questioned the Pulitzer jury's judgment, sparked a particularly extended public debate about whether popular accessibility and literary ambition were genuinely in tension in the novel. Critics who loved it argued that its ambition, its readability, its emotional richness, and its engagement with the nineteenth-century tradition of the novel as a total form were exactly what literary fiction needed.
How does The Goldfinch connect to The Secret History?
Tartt's two most celebrated novels are formally quite different — The Secret History is a psychological novel about a closed group of Greek scholars at a Vermont college; The Goldfinch is a picaresque novel about a boy's journey across fifteen years of American life. But they share a preoccupation: both are about the way a single catastrophic event (a murder, a bombing) warps the life of an intelligent, sensitive person into a shape they could not have predicted, and both are interested in beauty — aesthetic beauty, the beauty of particular objects, the beauty of particular ways of thinking — as a force that is simultaneously a refuge and a danger. Both novels are also deeply literary in their affiliations: The Secret History draws on Greek tragedy; The Goldfinch draws on the nineteenth-century European novel, especially Dickens.
What happens to Theo at the end of The Goldfinch?
Without giving away everything: Theo's involvement with the criminal network surrounding the painting comes to a violent climax in Amsterdam, which results in deaths and a crisis that forces Theo to confront what the painting has actually meant to him and what he is going to do with his life. He returns the painting through a complicated arrangement that keeps him out of legal jeopardy. He ends up working with Hobie in New York, having settled into a life that is quieter and more rooted than anything that preceded it. The novel's long final section is a philosophical meditation on loss, beauty, and survival — on the argument that our attachments to particular objects and people, even if they lead us into grief and error, are more sustaining than any attempt at detachment.
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