Really only about 10% of this has to do with the damn painting

Wow, this book was long. And it took a long time to read — even long books don’t usually take me more than a few evenings and I feel like I spent two damn weeks with this one. And while I enjoyed it most of it, I feel like it 1. Could have been a hell of a lot shorter without affecting things too much and 2. Was not really what I expected (much more teenage angst, much less art-related heists).

“You can look at a picture for a week and never think of it again. You can also look at a picture for a second and think of it all your life”

So here’s the main plot of Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch: a young man (I think he’s 12 when it starts) named Theo loses his mother in an explosion in an art museum. Just prior to the explosion, he sees a girl his age with a man he presumes to be her father/grandfather, and gets a little moony over the girl. The man dies during the explosion, but leaves Theo with a few parting words and a ring. Theo also steals a painting from the museum — The Goldfinch. What follows has very little to do with the painting, and much to do with Theo coping with his mother’s death.  He manages to track down the girl, and eventually bonds with the girl’s Uncle Hobie, who restores furniture and does much for Theo’s mental health.

His father stays out of the picture for a while, so he lives with a friend’s family for a bit, and suffers quite obviously from untreated depression. Then Theo’s dad shows up, and everything changes again when he and his girlfriend (Xandra) move Theo to Las Vegas, where he discovers drugs and alcohol. Shit just goes downhill from there. The majority of this book consists of watching Theo make bad decisions and pay for about 1/3 of them, while wiggling out of the consequences of the rest. Meanwhile, the painting just kind of hovers in the background. It’s frustrating, to put it bluntly.

I liked Tartt’s writing style, actually. Very ramble-y, lots of description and run on sentences. I like that kind of writing — hell, I love Stephen King. My problem was with the plot — Theo just keeps fucking up over and over and by the end, I was just fed up with him. He screwed over quite a few people during the course of the book — including Hobie, who was an angel — and after awhile, I just wanted to be done with the guy.