Reviews with content warning for Drug use - The Goldfinch

I read The Goldfinch over five years ago and didn't particularly love or hate it. I thought it was a compelling Bildungsroman of sorts that was well-written, but I wasn't particularly attached to the characters or the story. I decided to reread this novel to see if my opinion changed (and I was in the mood to pick up a chunky book back when I started this).

My opinion certainly changed, but it was for the worse. This book did not age well by any means with all its racism, ableism, and classism. Tartt certainly writes with eloquence, but her writing is steeped with issues that left me cringing and frustrated. Something that caught my attention was the near absence of nonwhite characters in New York City, of all places, unless they were "the help." I'm not sure how I didn't catch this years ago, considering how glaring these details were.

I also found it even harder to sympathize with the protagonist, Theo, during this reread. The messiness of grief was well presented—even if it was a bit extreme with the addiction and alcoholism—but I was really unhappy with how Tartt went about Theo's relationships in such a dismissive way. He was so wrapped up in his own world that it negatively affected how he treated the people around him. Pippa is objectified in a Manic Pixie Dream Girl kind of way, while Kitsy was treated terribly. The queer experience that Theo had with Boris also went completely unaddressed, which makes me wonder why Tartt bothered adding this detail other than to shock the reader.

A disappointing reread, to say the least.

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_sophahs_'s review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional reflective slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

‘Only - if you care for a thing enough, it takes on a life of its own, doesn’t it?’

If I’m honest, I spent most of this book wondering what the hell it was about. Obviously, at surface level, it’s a story of a young boy who faces tragedy and turns to a tangible object to help him through it, from which he faces a number of issues. But it took me a long time to figure out the message of this book. And it was only towards the end that Boris introduced me to what I believe is one of the key takeaways of this novel. It’s a novel about morality, but, more than that, it questions innate morality. ‘That line [between good and bad] is often false. The two are never disconnected. One can’t exist without the other.’

‘The Goldfinch’ is also about growing up, and the way the past affects the present. Theo is just thirteen when the novel begins and so much changes for him. By the end, his life is completely different - both parents gone, a drug addict, a thief, a murderer - and yet, somehow, his thirteen-year-old consciousness is still there. We as readers can still recognise him.

You could easily argue that the painting threw Theo off the rails, but I would suggest it put him on the rails.

Another thing I love about this book is the side characters, namely Boris and Hobie. Almost unarguably the most important people in Theo’s life following his mother’s death, they are complete opposites, and yet we are somehow made to connect to both of them. That’s not to say that we necessarily like Boris (though in a way I do, very much so), but we care for him nevertheless. Despite his flaws, he saved Theo, and helped him through his rocky (to say the least) childhood. As for Hobie, bless his goddamn heart.

I know I just described Hobie and Boris as opposites, but perhaps they aren’t so opposite as one might think. They say similar things about good coming from bad places towards the end - “What if our badness and mistakes are the very thing that set our fate and bring us round to good?” / “Can’t good come around sometimes through some strange back doors?”. So perhaps the major, underlying theme of this novel is humanity. That’s what it all comes back to.

Anyway, I adore Donna Tartt. ‘The Goldfinch’ is so different to ‘The Secret History’ but the distinctive features of her writing are present in both. Her novels are long, but you don’t necessarily notice the length because you just want to keep reading. They follow characters who are flawed, misguided, lost. But for me, the defining feature of Tartt’s works are the opening lines. Being told the answer, or a snippet of the future, at the very beginning of the book, and thus knowing that the details you read will eventually tie everything together. The opening lines of ‘The Goldfinch’ and ‘The Secret History’ are definitively ‘hooks’, and they keep you hooked, even 800 pages later…

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lily_eames's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional inspiring mysterious reflective sad tense slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.0

How is it that nothing can happen in 770 pages spanning 20 years? Don’t ask me. I’ll just say that after Theo became an adult, it felt like every page was a chore—I did enjoy the childhood/teenage parts, but after that… this book is so far from my favorite novel of all time (The Secret History) that it’s hard to believe it was written by the same author. Despite the Pulitzer Prize sticker on the front, I can’t bring myself to muster more than slight admiration for Tartt’s descriptive writing style. The plot, in my opinion, was so slow and anticlimactic that I am honestly proud of myself for getting to the end.

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the_planetarywanderer's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional reflective sad slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.75

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bubblebees's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional reflective medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

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babbieabbi's review against another edition

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challenging emotional reflective sad slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.0

I wanted to rate this book higher, because I really loved the first half of it. The prose was beautiful throughout the book. I enjoyed the plot and the characters were great. But I can’t rate this book much higher because it also had some drawbacks. The first was the length. It was way longer than needed, and most things were drawn out much longer than necessary, especially in the last half of the book. And while I found the book poetic and meaningful, the ending felt a little forced, a little too insightful (for lack of a better word) to match the rest of the book or to let me draw my own conclusions about what was meaningful. Overall I liked it, but I don’t think I would read it again

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arramachandran's review against another edition

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challenging dark reflective tense slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.5

3.5, the last 20 pages of this book basically saved it for me. However, I think there is something to be said, or rather many things to be said about the portrayal of POC in this book. Every single non-white character is in a service position (doormen, cooks, cleaners, drivers, and social workers), and Tartt builds the characters off of stereotypical fantasies, specifically the deeply offensive “Sikh taxi driver” caricature that made me angry when I read it. Even Boris, Gyuri, and all the other Eastern European characters fulfill every vodka-soaked stereotype of that region.

Side note: why did she make Boris say the n-word multiple times? They were throwaway phrases in parentheses that added nothing to the story, and it made my jaw drop when I read it. It really seems like she wrote it in because she wanted to, and I’d like to meet the editor that let that pass through.

Anyways, although Tartt’s prose is beautiful and quite profound as always, remembering the shameful writing of POC characters brought down my experience of reading the book.

Content Warnings

azureumbreon's review against another edition

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challenging emotional mysterious slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

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