The Goldfinch

Summary

The novel tells the story of Theodore Drecker, from around the time when his mother dies in a terrorist attack in a museum in New York. Theo survives, and in the rubble stays with an old guy until the old guy dies. The old guy gives Theo a ring and a set of instructions to bring the ring to Hobart and Blackwells, a furniture shop. Theo also steals a famous painting by Carel Fabritius, The Goldfinch, which Theo has equated with his mother.

Theo lives with a well-to-do family called the Barbours and spends time with James “Hobie” Hobart after returning the ring. There he also meets a girl named Pippa who he was infatuated with at the museum and who he remains infatuated with for the entirety of the novel. Eventually, Theo’s derelict father comes to adopt him, taking him to Las Vegas with his (the father’s) new girlfriend.

In Las Vegas, Theo becomes friends with a kid named Boris. They drink and do drugs and generally lack adult supervision. They come and go to school as they see fit, and Theo’s father is a drug-addicted gambler who is never around. Theo’s father, who was in massive debt to a local bookie and who is also an alcoholic, relapses and crashes his car, and dies. Theo escapes Las Vegas with his dog and heads back to New York.

Theo goes to live with Hobie. All the while, Theo is carrying around his pilfered painting, and the thought of getting caught with it is consuming. He lives with Hobie for a while before going to school.

Fast forward 8 years, and Theo is living with Hobie, running the shop. He is also conning lots of people, selling Hobie’s restorations as the real thing to unwitting customers. He is also doing lots of drugs. Eventually, he happens to run into Boris in New York while he is looking for drugs, and Boris tells him that he exchanged the painting when they were in Las Vegas, to Theo’s surprise. Boris promises he’ll get the painting back. Boris is some sort of international thief, a character of ill-repute but with a zest for life.

Theo is engaged to marry Kitsey Barbour, sister to his friend Andy (who, along with his father died tragically in a boat accident). Kitsey is cheating on Theo, and they don’t really love each other, but have found each other in their grief. Kitsey’s marriage to Theo is her way of helping her mother, who is clearly depressed with the loss of her son and husband and views Theo as a surrogate son.

Eventually, Boris locates the painting and drags Theo to Amsterdam (Theo’s Damascus, as he says – remember Saul on the road to Damascus getting struck by lightning and seeing the light of God). They locate the painting, but things go terribly wrong and then Theo shoots a guy in the head. He then holes up in his Amsterdam hostel with a flu, alternating between doing heroin and sleeping a fevered sleep. Eventually, he decides he is going to turn himself in. As he goes to open the door, he runs into Boris. Boris has called the “art cops” on the painting thieves, and then he gives Theo the reward money.

Boris has a speech about life, then Theo returns home and Hobie has a speech about life, then Theo has a closing monologue, and the novel ends with Theo addressing his “non-existent” reader, to tell them that “life—whatever else it is—is short. That fate is cruel but maybe not random. That Nature (meaning Death) always wins but that doesn’t mean we have to bow and grovel to it. That maybe even if we’re not always so glad to be here, it’s our task to immerse ourselves anyway: wade straight through it, right through the cesspool, while keeping eyes and hearts open.”

Some Themes

authenticity & the self

Recreations of paintings compared to real paintings, but also paintings compared to the reality they depict. There is a long-ish monologue about how the goldfinch that Fabritius depicts actually must have existed, and must have been chained to a post as someone’s pet. But that existence gave way to a masterpiece, the implication being that from suffering can be born immense and immutable and timeless beauty.

Hobart also restores old furniture pieces for a living, often making them better than they once were, but, now irrevocably not “authentic”. The paradox of theseus’s ship applies here. As we accrue experience and suffering and joy, replacing the parts of ourselves that those emotions irretrievably alter until nothing of our old selves remain, are we still our authentic self? Does our essence precede our existence, or are we only the sum of our experiences?

Art in general and painting in particular extends this dilemma; is a painting just a reflection of some truth or is it the truth itself? Is the goldfinch chained to a perch in some Dutch socialites sitting room the masterpiece, or does it need to be filtered through the transpositions of mediums, from the atoms arranged into biology to the pigments on a canvas?

grief and suffering

The painting of the goldfinch functions on a few levels: as a physical symbol of Theo’s grief, as a remembrance of his mother, as survivor’s guilt, as self- and outer-imposed captivity. The gravitational pull of the painting’s perceived worth is what drives the novel. And yet, so many bad decisions and bad outcomes in Theo’s life could have been avoided if he had just turned the painting in. Confusedly, the paintings ultimate return leads to the best outcome in Theo’s life, a final reckoning with the guilt of his mother’s death and his subsequent actions

drug use

Theo, and Boris, use a lot of drugs in this novel. Not really sure what Tartt was going for, but it was refreshing to for the literary eye here to not moralize the usage of drugs. So often in novels drugs convey that the user is “on a bad path” and that path nearly always ends in some sort of rock bottom, like a Chekhov’s syringe.

thoughts on this book

The book is certainly immersive. The plot is relatively compelling, and there were points where I wanted to read ahead to see what might happen. And it certainly earns the Dickensian moniker. It is a mashup of Dicken’s plots and tropes. Plenty of others much smarter and well-read than I have drawn the comparisons. But it feels like fatty food. Delicious while you are eating it but unfulfilling. Because I’m not sure the book has a ton to say about it’s relatively grandiose themes. Theo’s grand summation is that life is short. This is no parable, nothing has signification. The book appears to rely on the heft of artistic tradition in its often ineffable importantness to seem to say that this book is also important, as if to say that a book about an artistic masterpiece must also be a masterpiece.