The Goldfinch - a book review
In the year 2013, in a small, crowded bakery in New York's SoHo neighborhood, a man born in the same year as me invented cronuts. Cronuts quickly became a sensation, first in NY and then around the world. The same year, the word selfie made it into the dictionary, and a NY publishing house brought to life a 771-page novel called The Goldfinch. This novel stole the hearts of many people worldwide, winning the Pulitzer Prize in 2014. Since that year, I have wanted to read it.
Two things deterred me. First, the book is LONG. I have read longer books, for sure. But I know that committing to a long book is not to be taken lightly. You have to rapidly know if the material is worth it - if you are going to be absorbed, if the writing is going to hold water. A 700+ page book can take anywhere from a few weeks to more than a month to finish. So, you better go into it with both eyes peeled wide. Secondly, the book is dark. You realize that as soon as you read the back cover. Here is the Amazon.com description for The Goldfinch:
Theo Decker, a 13-year-old New Yorker, miraculously survives an accident that kills his mother. Abandoned by his father, Theo is taken in by the family of a wealthy friend. Bewildered by his strange new home on Park Avenue, disturbed by schoolmates who don't know how to talk to him, and tormented above all by a longing for his mother, he clings to the one thing that reminds him of her: a small, mysteriously captivating painting that ultimately draws Theo into a wealthy and insular art community…He is alienated and in love -- and at the center of a narrowing, ever more dangerous circle. The Goldfinch is a mesmerizing, stay-up-all-night and tell-all-your-friends triumph, an old-fashioned story of loss and obsession, survival and self-invention.
My partner often jokes that I seem to take perverse pleasure in picking excruciatingly sad shows or movies on the days when it's my turn to pick our choice of TV (which he would also argue is ALL THE TIME). I am not one for shying away from sad movies or literature. But still, 771 pages of depressing material can become too much, especially if we are talking about reading that material over long winter nights after grueling days of work. For the last eight years or so, I have borrowed the book many times from the local library, only for the loan to expire before I felt compelled to read it.
That changed this February when I finally worked up the courage to tackle the book. And what a delight it was to read it! I finished it in ten days, often reading well into the night, crooking my neck against my pillow and resting my kindle against my partner's pillow. The book was - as the cliché goes - hard to put down.
The Goldfinch is the coming-of-age tale of a boy who loses his mother in an accident. After that devastating loss, things happen to him. Things that are alternatively sad or lovely, but always interesting and incredibly crazy. He moves from classy homes in Upper East Side New York to a soulless house in Las Vegas back to the home of a kind, generous man in Downtown Manhattan - continually adjusting to his new circumstances, continually learning the rules of his new world, continually surviving whatever his new situations throw at him.
Such is the life of displaced kids everywhere - children that survive the loss of one or both parents, those that have to leave their home in moments of large or small conflicts, children that are abandoned or sent to foster homes. I have heard this story in real life many times. I have endured it myself after losing my own mother. I have lived in houses where humans were at once kind and cruel. I have endured abuse at the hands of family while simultaneously finding the care and the space in their homes to make something of myself. Bad things have happened in my life, but so too have many good things.
This is the case for Theo Decker, the protagonist of The Goldfinch,, as well. Theo would receive the kindness of many strangers throughout the course of his life. He would fall in love with a girl. He would love a dog, and the dog would love him back to bits. He would experience heartwarming, staunch friendships. One of the characters that would become his friend is Boris Pavlikovsky, a Ukrainian boy that is also motherless and drifting from place to place. Boris is one of the best characters I have ever had the pleasure of reading. There is something about that boy that draws you in - his quips, his loyalty, his affection, his rollercoaster of a life.
Theo would also face neglect, cruelty, and misfortune. He would do many bad things. He would become obsessed with art. In particular, with one painting - the painting of a little bird, a European goldfinch that is chained to its feeder. He would go to insane extents for the sake of that little painting.
"Because, if bad can sometimes come from good actions—? where does it ever say, anywhere, that only bad can come from bad actions? Maybe sometimes—the wrong way is the right way? You can take the wrong path and it still comes out where you want to be? Or, spin it another way, sometimes you can do everything wrong and it still turns out to be right?"
-- The Goldfinch
This book is a bildungsroman, one boy's coming of age. It is about loss and grief. It is about trauma and the long-lasting impact of it. It is about broken childhoods and lives that become adrift due to reasons not in one's control. It is above all about love. Love of a child for his mom, love of beautiful objects, love of a friend, love of a little dog, love of a young boy for the "wrong girl". It is about love of life itself. For whatever else happens to our hero Theodore Decker, he lives a most interesting life tumbling from high to low to high, surviving many catastrophes.
I would not have thought I'd read such a long and heavy book in under two weeks. But the writing is beautiful, crisp, and taut. There are many layers to the story. The characters and the dialogues sparkle. Reading the book, I felt like I was reading a Dostoevsky or a Dickens novel. One of these complex, meandering stories that leave a mark on your mind. If you want immerse yourself in a good story written by a master storyteller, I recommend this book to you. I hope you like it as much as I did.