Wednesday, April 01, 2026

The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt

If you liked Tartt's The Secret History, you'll love this. It's just as immersive, and as Dickensian, as ever, and Tartt does a masterful job of weaving deatils and cognition into everything. It's a long book, with sentences built on reflections, and some sentences spanning a page or more. I didn't read this book so much as I inhabited it, or, more accurately, let it inhabit me. 

This is another round of David Copperfield, and while the original tale came from England, we in the States seem to eat it up mightily, perhaps becuase twenty-first cetury America is so neat a parallel to nineteenth century England. 

The power of found family, the power of the truth, and the power of being seen ring through with authenticity and brilliance. Ultimately the power of a life of substance holds the key to the whole novel, and Tartt couldn't have chosen a better painting on which to hang her tale.