The Goldfinch - Donna Tartt
Donna Tartt is going to become my nemesis. Much like The Secret History, The Goldfinch starts strong, but by the end of the novel I was completely disillusioned with it.
For the first 3- or 400 pages I was in love with this book. Tartt’s writing is exquisite, the world she builds rich and detailed and springing off the page with life. Theo is a very well-realised grieving 13-year-old, and the tragedy of his life is gripping. (Something that struck me in the opening moments was the similarity between this and Catherine Airey’s Confessions, still one of my favourite books of the year, and I wonder if Airey is a Tartt fan.) The sense that everything that happens to Theo is out of his control comes across perfectly, and I felt every moment of his frustration and fear.
Things go downhill for me as the book enters its second half, jumping forward in time to show us Theo as an adult. Here I was suddenly faced a muted version of the feelings Theo has been feeling through the first half of the book, the sense that everything I had been looking forward to had been ripped away from me and I’d been left to pick up the pieces. There are so many interesting threads being developed - Theo’s relationship with Hobie, his burgeoning interest in antiques and furniture restoration, his growing paranoia over the painting under his bed - and all of them are taken from us as we’re dumped into a world where all of this has already been resolved in some way, left to pick up the pieces and figure out what happened in the time we missed.
It’s a common theme here that after the opening, all of the most interesting moments in the novel happen off-page. My feeling with The Secret History was that I’d been conned a little by Tartt, and I feel similarly here.
As the book goes on I also became much less patient with Theo as a narrator. Tartt does an excellent job of writing an angsty teenager, but once he reaches adulthood he never stops being moody and self-centred. Tartt’s prose, usually a joy to read, often slips into overwrought, seemingly endless passages of Theo wallowing in the mistakes he’s made - not least in the final chapter, in a drug-fuelled breakdown in a hotel in Amsterdam that was tedious to read and that left me desperately wishing for the book to be over. It cast a real pall over the book for me, especially as I’d loved it so much to begin with.
That’s not to say that this isn’t good and isn’t worth reading, but the front half definitely outshines the back half. I think it’s very telling that I read the opening 300ish pages in a day or two and then took close to two weeks to finish the rest of the book, dragging myself back to it to read it a handful of pages at a time.
I feel I should now read The Little Friend for the sake of completion, but I honestly don’t know if I have it in me to let Donna Tartt fool me again.