4 October 2023
By Hyun Cho
Review
“Sometimes we want what we want, even if we know it’s going to kill us.”
It is when you read pieces like Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch that you realize that modern literature has failed us.
A lot of the books that we are accustomed to fail to leave lasting impressions. Most of them are just a dull, pallid hum under our fingers, writing devoid of surface-breaking contemplation and the dimensional imperfectness of the characters, which is precisely what gives them human-like qualities. These books are superficial, bland, and uninventive. They render in us no attachment that calls for a complex mix of emotions other than general sadness, shock, and hope—and I’ve realized this twofold after reading The Goldfinch.
After all, this book showed me what literature could be. Each sentence is bursting with raw emotion and delicately-laid prose. If there is such a thing as godly writing, I would say Donna Tartt came pretty close to it. The way she ties everything together, stringing along the coincidental events and abrupt epiphanies of life, gives the breathtaking impression of a life truly lived and experienced. Every word is a rollercoaster of emotion, a gasp of life woven into the pages. For me, it got to the point where everything seemed so alive that I couldn’t bear to leave the pages unread. Something about this book called to me, luring me in with an almost audible whisper that I just had to leaf through the pages and let the characters breathe within the writing in which they lived. Writing of this caliber seem to have this effect, and Donna Tartt is no exception.
The story begins with Theodore Decker, sprawled out and feverish in his hotel in Amsterdam. There, he reminisces about his mother—his recollection of her, the figure that he had created out of her remnants. We see him searching the newspapers in a language he cannot understand as he uncovers the key terms of crime in frantic desperation and sickness. As he drifts back to when he was a teenager, before and after the bombing that took his mother’s life, we’re led to a narrative that holds the question of what went wrong.
And indeed, Donna Tartt portrays this with the skilled flick of her pen. While Theo is a deeply flawed character, more often than not acting on self-justified impulse rather than prudence and control, he is tethered to a series of unfortunate coincidences that make you wonder whether his flaws are due to his character or the environment in which he is subject. With the large ground of society that this book covers, from old money socialites to gambling addicts in Vegas to vagabonds that move from Australia, Ukraine, and America, Tartt seamlessly brings together a large cast of characters differentiated by their varying backgrounds and morals that are cultivated as a result of circumstance. The result is the creation of a worldly masterpiece, evoking questions of philosophy, obsession, morality, and the immortality of art.
“Whatever teaches us to talk to ourselves is important: whatever teaches us to sing ourselves out of despair. But the painting has also taught me that we can speak to each other across time. And I feel I have something very serious and urgent to say to you, my non-existent reader, and I feel I should say it as urgently as if I were standing in the room with you. 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.”
While The Secret History, Donna Tartt’s earlier masterpiece, closed with what I like to think of as an orchestral thump, the heavy ending after a dramatic climax, I’ve found The Goldfinch to be more loosely finished, leaving more for the imagination. Additionally, it was a comparably easier read, which is probably because over 500 pages of the mammothian book were devoted to teenage Theo compared to the entirety of The Secret History being in an academia setting. Furthermore, the writing definitely flowed more smoothly and was less densely packed with paranoia and philosophical material in general. In other words, it was less intense than The Secret History. If Donna Tartt’s former work is blood-red with intensity and drama, The Goldfinch is a shade of warm fluorescence, the crisp apple tinge of vintage papers that becomes more apparent with wear. It gently tugs you in, surrounding you in its transcendent essence, and, in an oddly rapturous fashion, builds upon you with each twist and turn of Donna Tartt’s breathtaking prose.
Pulitzer-prize winning and the product of 10 years of work, there’s a reason why this book is hailed as a modern classic, and it’s an infinitely valid one. The book itself was an experience—a grippingly emotional and intelligent narrative I’ve lived through. If you’re looking to immerse yourself in an intensely dazzling experience, be sure to pick this book up.
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