Weighty but Worth It

[Finished 7/28/14]  This weighty novel took a long time to finish (especially because it was way too big to lug with me on RAGBRAI) but overall, I found it fascinating and gripping, even as I noted some of the moments that felt like a “glorious mess,” particularly the ending.

Donna Tartt tells the story of Theo Decker and his life reads like a Dickens’s story translated to the 21^st century. A twist of fate finds Theo and his mom at a New York museum just before tragedy strikes. Theo survives but finds himself “orphaned,” since his father abandoned the family a few years before and his father’s parents don’t seem particularly interested in taking him on. He stays with the family of a friend from the private school he is attending (as a scholarship student) and finds himself both welcome and unwelcome. As he struggles to make sense of his loss, the one thing that seems to connect him to his mom is a painting, The Goldfinch, he rescued (stole) from the museum after the explosion. It is this painting that drives much of the action of this novel—even as Theo is spirited away from New York and taken to Las Vegas to live with his father, an alcoholic gambler, and his father’s new girlfriend.

Just as in Great Expectations, Theo has a great love, Pippa—another young person he saw minutes before the explosion—with an elderly man. Right after the explosion, Theo finds the man and is with him as he dies. The man gives him a ring and that leads Theo to Pippa and the man’s business partner, Hobie. Theo’s life continues to revolve around Hobie and Pippa even as he leaves New York, returns, and becomes an adult.

I don’t want to indulge in too much plot summary here both because it’s pretty complicated and this novel is more about the relationships between the characters and how early events continue to play out in the lives of those who experienced them. There are a lot of drugs and discussions of art in this novel but they work—for the most part. I’m sure there is a lot to pick apart in this work, but I found myself fully invested in Theo and the people around him—complicated, flawed, but fascinating.