'Cause It's a Bittersweet Bildungsroman, This Book

The Goldfinch: A Novel by Donna Tartt.

Little, Brown and Company, 2013.  771 pages.

The Pulitzer Project

We do the heavy lifting and carry this bildungsroman through the Cellar Door: a big, compelling, beautiful-but-flawed novel of formation, a coming-of-age story that ends up taking The Prize this year.  So, gentle fans of literary criticism and esoteric terminology, what goes on amidst those hundreds of page after Pulitzer-winning pages?  To begin, thirteen-year-old Theodore Decker survives a terrorist bombing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art: a cataclysmic moment of violence that kills his mother and launches Our Protagonist Narrator on a so-tragio-it's-comedic life trajectory, an exhausting physical and psychological journey from youth to adulthood, and for us, an exhaustive flight of heart-and-mind-flipping fiction.

In the moments before the explosion, Theo makes eye contact with Pippa, a girl with bright red hair and golden honeybee brown eyes who will become the unrequited love of his life.  And in the wake of the explosion, Pippa's grandfather, mortally wounded, shares a gruesomely poignant interlude with Theo, muttering plot-propelling requests and fatefully encouraging him to remove from the museum a seventeenth-century painting by Dutch master Carel Fabritius... to filch The Goldfinch, to pinch the finch, so to speak.

A Lot of Plot Happens in Vegas.

Suddenly alone in the world, Theo finds physical refuge with the Park Avenue family of a circumstantial friend and emotional solace with Hobie, the affable Greenwich Village proprietor of an antiques restoration shop.  Things go from sad to worse, however, when Theo's ne'er-do-well father reappears, spiriting Our Protagonist Narrator to a teenage wasteland on Desert End Road, Las Vegas, Nevada.  Here we find negligible parental supervision and precipitous dissolution into despair, degeneracy, and drug use with Russian So-Very-Very-Bad Boy Boris.  When things go from worse to sadly worse, Theo returns to New York, stumbling through school and entering into business with Hobie.

The Goldfinch.

Not surprisingly, the complex, damaged, oft-drugged and alienated adolescent Theo matures into the complex, damaged, oft-drugged and alienated adult Theo, ricocheting between the dusty domesticity of Hobie's antiques shop, the swanky drawing rooms of affluent patrons, and the dangerous duplicity of the art underworld, the latter thanks to The Goldfinch.  From the terrible wreckage of the museum and through the terrible wreckage of his life, The Goldfinch is the thing Theo conceals and carries and holds near-- sometimes in a suitcase, sometimes in a pillowcase, often wrapped in duct tape, sometimes in  a shopping bag, sometimes in a rented storage unit-- always in heart and mind. 

Great Expectations.

Many have commented upon it and, indeed, we find the novel imbued with a distinctive Dickensian spirit: an Orphan Protagonist Narrator, a picaresque plot, colorful, well-monikered characters, timeless examination of the relationship between Orphan Protagonist Narrator and Society, epic struggle between good and evil impulses in the world.  Good and evil.  Virtue and vice.  The exhausting exhaustiveness of The Goldfinch implies that these diametric opposites form symbiotic relationships: goodness and virtue exist because of evil and vice and... vice versa.

The Scream: Thank You Very Edvard Munch.

Dickensian, yes, but the novel isn’t perfect.  There is impulsive detail, clumsy symbolism, clunky coincidence.  Intrepid Bibliophile NWC is reading it, she’s liking it... but it makes her want to SCREAM!  Because we get The Goldfinch from Theo's point of view: Theo, the magnetic, maddening, heart-breaking, head-spinning orphan narrator.  We are post-traumatically stressed!  We are filled with cosmic angst!  We empathize to the point of self-loathing!  Dear Dutch Master, we are consorting with a criminal! And then Our Criminal Orphan Protagonist Narrator offers up an emotional zinger, sharing a great sorrow... we don't get to choose our own hearts.  We can't make ourselves want what's good for us or what's good for other people.  We don't get to choose the people we are.  Oh Boy: time for reprisal of the Fate versus Free Will Argument.  We've heard this song before.  Sing it, circa 1997 Britpop band, The Verve: 

Art Conservation.

I can't change my mold... no, no, no, no, no.... Despite flaws and contradiction-- perhaps because of flaws and contradiction, The Goldfinch wins our hearts and most of our minds, most of the time.  It is slow to build but moves at an urgent pace.  It's long but, KMJ decides, not too long.  It is large and loud and trenchant and rambling, nothing like the small and subdued and subtle, intimately-rendered titular painting-- but married to it in eloquent ways.  Only occasionally did I notice the chain on the finch's ankle, recollects Theo, or think what a cruel life for a little living creature-- fluttering briefly, forced always to land in the same hopeless place. 
When we come to the end, we take The Goldfinch—with its loss and love, ugliness and beauty, sorrow and survival, ruin and redemption—wrap it with newspaper, seal it with duct tape, put it in a pillowcase, then in a shopping bag, and store it on a hopeful shelf in the climate-controlled recesses of the Cellar Door.