*Goldfinch

bc the goldfinch

Our November book club pick was “Goldfinch,” by Donna Tart. The national best seller won this year’s Pulitzer Prize in fiction.

The book got a lot of attention, which inevitably peeked my curiosity and I decided to choose it for our book club. It also sparked a big debate in the literary world see http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2014/07/goldfinch-donna-tartt-literary-criticism#.
Is it literature or not? Time will tell. But, that isn’t important to me or my book club. What is important is that we are taken to a place to learn, to understand, to comprehend in a way that we enjoy.

The story begins with a 13-year-old boy (Theo Decker) who goes to the museum with his mother. A bomb explodes while Theo is in another section of the museum. He wakes up close to a dying man with carnage all around. The man convinces Theo to get out of the museum and take the broken framed Goldfinch painting that’s lying next to them. His confusion, fear and youth are written to perfection. This is a strong, vibrant, and realistic passage.

Theo and the painting will spend a long time together. Through the next few decades Theo is surrounded mostly by malicious and immoral people and he veers off the course his mother would have desired and ends up having to navigate on an unchartered, haphazard trail littered with missteps and broken promises.

Theo in a way becomes the reader’s surrogate child. As any parent will attest we don’t always like what our children are doing, but we always love them and encourage them. We cringe when Theo makes some bad decisions as he tries to navigate a world with no compass or map. He has only one real, non-family anchor that supports him at various times throughout his life with an incredible, generous love, but it’s not enough to steer him away from himself. Theo struggles, sometimes justifiably.

Tart uses words in her story like a gardener plants his seeds with affectionate design and passionate precision. The story unfolds layer upon layer like the seasonal perennials blooming in a well-loved garden. I admittedly stumbled in a few arduous places in the novel, but by the end I felt a lush tale had been told in an abundant landscape of 771 pages.

Only half of our members read this book. Most work and the story was too large to get done in a month. The members who read the book, loved it. We talked about how Theo transformed and how he did become the person his mother would have been proud of. We had a few good conversations regarding nature v. nurture that were brought out in this work. Also, we discussed forgiveness and making amends, parenting and the people we meet in our lives.

This novel was certainly one of the “It” books this year, and worth the praise.

Rating : 8.0

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