The novel's range gives Tartt's sparkly writing the canvas it deserves. Soon (but not soon enough), he becomes a more cultivated version of his gambler-druggie father, passing off Hobart's reconstructions-"beautiful young Frankensteins"-as Chippendale originals and learning that "even on the highest levels it was smoke and mirrors everyone was furnishing a stage set." Related: The 10 Best Thrillers and Crime Writing By WomenĪnd we're not halfway through! Theo flees to New York City, lives in an antiques shop run by a kindly furniture restorer named Hobart, frets further about his purloined painting, pines for a fellow Met-bombing survivor named Pippa, and eventually reunites with Boris.
( The Goldfinch is lousy with horrible dads.) Also on tap are a drug-dealing stepmother, glue-sniffing petty thief Boris, and an American desertscape of mediocrity that seems to horrify Tartt as much as the bloodbath that led Theo there. After a stint with a rich schoolmate's family, he finds himself in Las Vegas in the care of his deadbeat father. The bomb goes off, mother dies, and Theo steals the priceless painting accidentally on purpose.
The Goldfinch begins, like every Tartt novel, with murder most gruesome: a terrorist attack at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where 13-year-old Theo's mother has just explained to him the title painting's art-historical import (Fabritius was Rembrandt's student and Vermeer's teacher). "If suffering makes noble, then he is a prince," Boris says of Theo in his Ukraine-via-Vegas English. Only imagine that Oliver became one of Fagin's eager thieves, driven by nihilism and an artful-dodger buddy named Boris. Tartt cites Dickens as a major influence, and Oliver Twist is an obvious model for antihero Theo Decker's wild ride.
Related: Is The Goldfinch the Next Hunger Games ?Įleven years after that, The Goldfinch returns us to the haughty, ethereal terrain of The Secret History-antiques, Europhiles, drug cocktails, despair-but broadens the scope. Play icon The triangle icon that indicates to play
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