Elliot Rawdin

    elliotrawdin@yahoo.com

    TWISTING through art, love, life and death, this year’s Pulitzer Prize winner marks a triumphant return by the author of “The Secret History” and “The Little Friend,” cementing her position as one of America’s greatest living novelists.

    When 13-year-old Theo Decker loses his mother to a terrorist attack at a New York Gallery, he is plunged into an unfamiliar world of misery and chaos. Packed off to live with the wealthy family of a classmate, Decker is forced to reevaluate his life and acclimatize himself to an existence where the stabilizing center has fallen out. From the bright lights of NYC to the scorching heat of Las Vegas, author Donna Tartt’s epic bildungsroman tracks Decker’s turbulent adolescence, sketching a vivid world in which kindly antiques dealers, sleazy gangsters and wicked stepmothers flourish.

    Rich in themes and magnificent in scope, “The Goldfinch” — whose title refers to the 17th century masterpiece kept by Decker after the gallery attack — is primarily concerned with both grief and the transformative power of love. Relationships fade and fail in Decker’s life, friends drift apart, but his love of his painting and the red-haired Pippa remains a strong and powerful force, corrupting him at times and saving him at others.

    Tartt’s writing is spectacularly good. Descriptions of the baking Nevada landscape work perfectly alongside images of an Amsterdam twinkling at Christmas, while the plot, occasionally allowed to stray from its roots, evolves into a taut and moody thriller by the final act.

    That’s not to say that this novel is without its flaws. At over 800 pages, “The Goldfinch” weighs enough to break a bulletproof window, and one cannot help but feel that the ending would have been vastly improved by a heavy edit. Tartt, famed for her perfectionism and lengthy working process (her three novels have been published over a 20-year period), seems to obsess over every detail, occasionally at the expense of pace. The last 50 pages or so are a particular drag. After several twists, an incident of shocking violence and a terrifically dark section in which a heroin-addled Decker contemplates suicide in his hotel room, Tartt takes us on a protracted plane journey, which sees our protagonist tying up every single loose end and informing us of the importance of righting the wrongs he has committed. Even in this section, there are moments of astonishing depth, but these are overshadowed by the sheer density of the prose and the employment of a storytelling mode that strays dangerously close to “dear reader” territory.

    All that said, “The Goldfinch” is a majestic literary achievement and a worthy winner of not only a Pulitzer Prize, but its status as a new American classic.