Book note
The Goldfinch
In Defence of The Goldfinch
“—if a painting really works down in your heart and changes the way you see, and think, and feel, you don’t think, ‘oh, I love this picture because it’s universal.’ ‘I love this painting because it speaks to all mankind.’ That’s not the reason anyone loves a piece of art. It’s a secret whisper from an alleyway. Psst, you. Hey kid. Yes you.”
Dismayed to find more than a handful of negative reviews for this recent favourite of mine online, I brazenly believe myself chosen to defend it. One common (and in my opinion, very surface level) critique I encountered was the novel’s length. Over 700 pages! Often followed by comments about excessive details and lulls in the book’s central plotlines, I dare say that the type of person to lodge these complaints was never going to be happy with The Goldfinch.
It is above all a book driven by character interiority and visceral, suffocating descriptions of grief. Is there anything ‘unnecessary’ about the fifth time Theo and Boris lie awake, drugged up, on a playground in the desert? Wasn’t it already established that they are grappling with addiction and trauma? Perhaps so, but there is no repetitiveness in the repetition. Tartt’s prose is beautiful and so lively that any open-hearted reader ought to feel as lost as Theo is lonely, the insistence of the writing only serving to draw you further into his mind.
I loved the “you and I against the world” nature of Boris & Theo’s friendship (+?), their different outlooks for dealing with a bad hand in life. The clash between Theo’s rational mind and unshakeable grief that causes him to spiral and sabotage relationships. The otherworldly quality of art and beauty as an anchor. One review pointed out that if you removed the painting from the story, most of it would remain unchanged. That may be so, but I think that this just goes to show what the The Goldfinch really meant to Theo: it was a coping mechanism, an ill-defined stand-in for something greater than life. His mother, his “what ifs”, the perceived void that is the cause for all his glorious self-pity. The narrative did not “need” the painting, but the qualities Theo attributed to it and his pursuit thereof defined his whole journey.
Because, between ‘reality’ on the one hand, and the point where the mind strikes reality, there’s a middle zone, a rainbow edge where beauty comes into being, where two very different surfaces mingle and blur to provide what life does not: and this is the space where all art exists, and all magic.
On a more general note, what is the problem with lengthy books? Is it not a gift to us readers that we are served the director’s cut of emotionally excruciating story? I like to think that I’d follow a compelling character forever if I could. It is not often that we get the opportunity to live a second life vicariously, in as much vivid detail as the close to 800 pages of Theo Decker gives us. I understand that reading is an exercise in trust and that this book asks for a large commitment. But if one yearns for “plot” or a speedier pace halfway through The Goldfinch, having truly taken the time to let descriptions sink in, then I am afraid that some readers must reconcile with the fact that they are blind to beauty.
I address this to the conglomerate of front page Google reviews I did not like. Maybe I just enjoy writing about books more when it’s from a defensive position, to allow for a fair bit of strawmanning and virtue signalling. At the end of the day, The Goldfinch is just a piece of art I fell in love with. And after all,
in the midst of our dying, as we rise from the organic and sink back ignominiously into the organic, it is a glory and a privilege to love what Death doesn’t touch.