A review by lauraleafromthelibrary
The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt

challenging dark emotional funny inspiring reflective sad medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? A mix
  • Strong character development? Yes
  • Loveable characters? Yes
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

4 ⭐️
  • A large part is set at Christmas (the last quarter) — not your typical Christmas story. 😆
  • “Disorder is the condition of the mind’s fertility.” — quote from Donna Tartt’s office wall; love this.
  • My favourite character is Boris.

  • Chapter 1: boy with a skull
    • Boy, 13 — Theodore Decker
    • Mom, Audrey — dies in NY, April 10 from a bomb explosion in a museum; 14 years ago.
      • Writing a memoir?
      • First person perspective.

  • Chapter 2: the anatomy lesson
    • We learn the father leaves them; he’s a total dumpster fire. He’s an alcoholic too.
    • The terror of being alone; the moments after the bomb felt so real. I loved the writing — it made me feel anxious.

  • Chapter 3: park avenue
    • The Barbour’s; their park avenue apartment is like a morgue, dark but also magnificent.
    • Page 88: “Everything was lost, I had fallen off the map: the disorientation of being in the wrong apartment, with the wrong family, was wearing me down, so I felt groggy and punch-drunk, weepy almost, like an interrogated prisoner prevented from sleeping for days. Over and over, I kept thinking I’ve got to go home and then, for the millionth time, I can’t.”
      • I’ve had this same feeling — it describes grief or loss so well.
    • The Decker grandparents are absolute trash.

  • Chapter 4: morphine lollipop
    • The ring; Hobie + Welty
    • Pippa; the beautiful girl
    • Page 146: “Are you done your hunger strike?” lol Toddy, what a menace
    • The morphine lollipop kiss.
    • I kinda love Andy.
    • Hobie’s workshop is chef’s kiss.
      • Theo likes old things.
      • He makes me see why.
    • Theo’s dad Larry + Xandra OMG 😳 what a nightmare; a perfect disaster.

  • Chapter 5: badr al-dine
    • They left a dog alone in the Vegas heat.
    • I hate that Theo has to deal with his father’s anger problem, like he’s responsible for his own parent.
    • Introduction of Boris; interesting guy.
    • The mention of Alberta + the CBC.
    • I thought Larry was bad but man, Boris’s dad takes the cake.

  • Chapter 6: wind, sand, and stars
    • The savings — his dad stealing from his own kid; getting a line of credit with his social security number. Dear GOD. 😳
    • Page 339: his dad dies from drunk driving.
    • I’m so glad he takes Popper with him; literally saved that dog’s life.
    • The whole time he wants to go back to the Barbour’s I’m literally screaming GO FIND HOBIE. I’m glad he had some sense.
    • Xandra’s parting words hit hard; I really hope Theo turns out better than his fucked up dad

  • Chapter 7: the-shop-behind-the-shop
    • Theo sick in bed and Pippa caring for him; its opposite. He’s still in love with her too.
    • Page 403: “‘Really disturbing, said Hobie — ‘Wounded people everywhere, people bleeding to death, and here’s this fellow snatching painting off the walls. Carrying them around outside in the rain.’”
      • We’ve never got the full story of why he took the painting at this point? He has SO much anxiety about it but he still keeps it.

  • Chapter 8: the-shop-behind-the-shop, continued
    • He gets into early college; starts acting like a normal human being again — despite the anxiety.
    • He’s lost contact with Boris at this point.
    • Finally puts the painting in storage.
    • His old apartment is torn down; another link to his past destroyed.

  • Chapter 9: everything of possibility
    • 8 years have passed.
    • Andy + his father have died; boating accident. Mr. Barbour was bipolar.
    • Theo sells furniture from the shop with Hobie.
    • Everett, the music librarian; Pippa’s new BF. The disgust.
    • And, Theo becomes addicted to pain medication during these years.
    • Page 473: “But at this point, in the spring of my twenty-sixth year, I had not been more than three days clean in a row in over three years.”
      • He’s become a bit of his father. Addictive tendencies.
    • Page 500: “All this time, I’d known it was a mistake, keeping the painting, and still I’d kept it. No good could come of keeping it. It wasn’t even as if it had done me any good or given me any pleasure. Back in Las Vegas, I’d been able to look at it whenever I wanted, when I was sick or sleepy or sad, early morning and the middle of the night, autumn, summer, changing with weather and sun. It was one thing to see a painting in a museum but to see it in all those lights and moods and seasons was to see it a thousand different ways and to keep it shut in the dark — a thing made of light, that only lived in light — was wrong in more ways than I knew how to explain. More than wrong: it was crazy.”

  • Chapter 10: the idiot
    • Kitsey + Theo are getting married.
      • Talk about opposites.
      • Page 515: “All the power and melancholy of wealth.”
    • Page 527: “Apparently I’d inherited it from him and, who knew, maybe Grandpa Decker as well, this violent procreative disgust buzzing loudly in my bloodstream; it felt inborn, wired-in, genetic.” 
      • Absolutely can relate. That’s me.
    • Boris is alive and still doing shady things.
      • Page 552: “‘I switched it. Yes. It was me. I thought you knew.’” OMGGGG
    • Page 559: “How could I have believed myself a better person, a wiser person, a more elevated and valuable and worthy-of-living person on the basis of my secret uptown? Yet I had. The painting had made me feel less mortal, less ordinary. It was support and vindication; it was sustenance and sum. It was the keystone that had held the whole cathedral up. And it was awful to learn, by having it so suddenly vanish from under me, that all my adult life I’d been privately sustained by that great, hidden, savage joy: the conviction that my whole life was balanced atop a secret that might at any moment blow it apart.”
      • THIS. Finally, an answer.
      • My favourite passage.
      • The answer and the curse.
    • Kitsey is cheating with Tom Cable; a boy who bullied Andy.
      • They’re still getting married? Yuck.

  • Chapter 11: the gentleman’s canal
    • Page 672: “‘Still wishing you had phoned the art cops, eh?’ he said, slinging his arm around my shoulder with his head close to mine, exactly as when we were boys. ‘We can still phone them,’ said Gyuri, with a shout of laughter, punching me on the other arm.”
      • This seems like foreshadowing.
      • All that work to get the painting back seems absurd.
      • He should have done the right thing from the start or let it go entirely.
    • Boris gets shot.
    • Theo kills Martin.
    • Some guy steals the painting.
    • Boris was actually so funny driving with the gunshot; babbling mess — I laughed out loud multiple times. I’m actually worried for that guy.

  • Chapter 12: the rendezvous point
    • Theo’s losses his passport.
    • The anxiety + paranoia are eating at him; the dark descent into madness + despair.
    • Being in a hotel room at Christmas; alone; feeling trapped.
    • Page 727: “Pippa wasn’t fooled by who I was. I had nothing to offer her. I was illness, instability, everything she wanted to get away from. Jail would only confirm what she knew. The best thing I could do was break off contact. If my father had really loved my mother — really loved her the way he said he had, once upon a time — wouldn’t he have done the same?”
      • We’ve come full circle.
    • Page 745: “‘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 painting is recovered; Boris is a genius.
      • Reward money + everything set to right. Sascha goes to jail.
    • Page 771: “That life — and 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. That maybe even if we’re not always so glad to be here, it’s our task to immerse ourselves anyway: wade straight through it, right through the cesspool, while keeping eyes and hearts open.” 🫶🏻