Will the real Goldfinch please stand up? Why you should read Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch.

Heads up: spoilers abound :)

Before having finished this book, I actually thought the Goldfinch painting that serves as the title of this book was Donna Tartt’s fictional creation. Actually, it’s not. Nor were the stories which surround the painting itself and its creator, Fabritius, that it seems, that a non-fiction book of the painting would make up a compelling story in itself.

Here’s the actual masterpiece, painted by Fabritius in 1654.

It’s fucking beautiful, isn’t it? Even without having seen the original, I was stunned.

The Goldfinch is many things, and then some. It is a lovesong to art in all its forms, it is the exploration of why art exists and whether art is truth or fiction (or both). It is a bildungsroman of a trauma-ridden adolescent. Above all, it is fiction of the most elite quality, as a Huffington Post reviewer aptly put: “a rare literary page turner.” Though I would argue that some of the best literature can also be page turners, we may not associate quick, digestible reads with much literary value. But this book is.

The goldfinch finds a new home in Theo Decker’s youth.

Theodore Decker, aged thirteen, and his mother, on the way to meet his principal at the school due to his recent suspension, had time to kill and thus stopped by the art gallery to admire the Dutch masters. But it was just one of those days when a terrorist flings by and set off a bomb right in the middle of the gallery which also killed his mother. Miraculously, Theo survived and found an elderly man at the edge of his death, who reminisced about his past and compelled Theo to take the painting of the goldfinch.

Practically an orphan, Theo had nowhere to go and opted to stay with his friend’s family, the Barbours, a somewhat privileged upper class family living in uptown New York. Yet, he was compelled to visit the dead man’s address, and found his business partner, Hobie who welcomed Theo right away like a long lost friend who shared a mutual secret. Hobie was also housing another survivor of the bomb blast, a girl about Theo’s age, Pippa, and one who he might have fallen in love with through a mere glimpse before the explosion.

Things were going alright with the Barbours but just as the Barbours were about to adopt him, Theo’s long lost father, who left him and his mother, reappeared in his life with his new girlfriend Xandra. After unpacking and selling his ex-wife’s possessions, Theo came to live with his father in the backwaters of Las Vegas, where not much really happened.

Except that he met his friend Boris, a Polish Ukrainian son of a miner. Dude speaks with a foreign accent, but had done everything in his life, including having sex and lots of drugs, which started Theo on a somewhat unhealthy spiral. When Theo’s father died an abrupt but somewhat timely death, which may or may not be caused by the loan sharks, Theo decided to move back to New York where he eventually settled with Hobie and took up the mantle of an antique furniture dealer.

The cracks in the canvas. The American Dream fails again.

The book is 963 pages long. And while some would argue that it’s too bloody long, I’d say that each page fits. For me, The Goldfinch is one of those books that picked up after 500 pages — not to say that the previous 500 pages was wasted. The book is neatly divided to Theo’s adolescence and his adulthood, when he was already in his mid-twenties. All the events in the earlier part of the book, no matter how trivial, how fickle, accumulated into impact once Theo ran into the Barbour’s eldest son, the disappointing Platt.

The Barbours are the aristocratic upper class of the New York society. This is also reflected in the family’s cold relationship with Theo, who was willing to shelter him as he was beneficial as a companion to their son Andy. However, it is not black and white, and there is a genuine connection which made the relationship warm enough. But we won’t know for sure if the Barbours would have been willing to adopt Theo, that question was left unanswered.

But the Barbours have their own problems. Underneath the clean façade of the shiny wooden varnish, the termites gnaw underneath. Platt often rages in delirious tantrums, and what the nature of his problem was as a youth we can only guess. Mr Barbour was plighted with manic depression. The whole family was in some form of medication to protect them from swaying to extreme moods.

Not that Theo’s father’s precarious living was any better. As a professional thrifter and gambler, Theo had then drifted down to the lower dregs of society with Larry and Xandra. There is rot at the top, but there is rot at the bottom too. Take the two fathers — we don’t exactly know what Mr Barbour and Larry do for their jobs though we can guesstimate. The mother counterparts also treated Theo with some coldness, but we can guess that despite this distance there is affection, and they may have cared about Theo more than they had shown.

In some ways, the two families are representative of the failures of the American Dream: for those who had achieved it, or born to it; and for those who strive for it. Perhaps it is the consequence of the American Dream at the fullest. The Barbours padded themselves with antique furniture and museum pieces while their mental health was no better than a druggy halfway house, and the Larry and Xandra who lived fast and enjoy life to the full while trying to make a quick buck. Both were also diseased by cash problems.

The masterly brushstrokes of the goldfinch

At heart of The Goldfinch is the question of art: the purpose of it, whether it stands on its own or whether it is a substitute for reality, or whether it is reality itself. In a metaphysical level, it also brings us to the question of the novel as art. The goldfinch masterpiece, though based on a real physical painting by a deceased physical artist after all, is fictional, as fictional as William Blake’s Tyger, the “y” in that tyger reminding us that it is man-made.

But Theo’s argument compels us to think that the illusion is the reality, or at least, the point where the reality meets the illusion: the trompe d’oeil of the painting, the trick of the eye:

“And as much as I’d like to think there’s a truth beyond illusion, I’ve come to believe that there’s no truth beyond illusion. Because, between ‘reality’ on the one hand, and the point where the mind strikes reality, there’s a middle zone, a rainbow edge where beauty comes into being, where two different surfaces mingle and blur to provide what life does not: and this is the space where all art exists, and all magic.”

And as Horst puts it when he’s on his spiel on the painting:

“There’s a doubleness. You see the mark, you see the paint for the paint, and also the living bird.”

The book, and fiction, is very much like that. And I suppose that this is why we read, go to museums and watch movies. We want to be tricked, we want to reach spaces where our own reality cannot reach, and escape from that fictional reality when we see fit. Though if we’re talking about Tartt’s masterpiece, it is very difficult to escape from this masterpiece until the end of the book. In some ways, I’m still immersed in it.

As Horst says, there is the doubleness, a duplicity. It is Tartt pulling our leg for 900+ pages, and we’re riding along for the ride, and emotions betraying us, enjoying it more than we’d expect. We know the fictional nature of the characters, we are fully aware of it, but from the distance and in hindsight as any good art would do, it is an apt imitation of our reality. That in this imitation there is a futile yet noble strive of the attainment of beauty. That the Barbours can be our next door neighbours, or Larry and Xandra as the people your family friends gossip about their fall from grace. And Theo himself, perhaps as another version of ourselves.

As Theo had put it, the painting can mean different things for different people and that our reactions to the art can be different from another person viewing it from a different time, from a different angle. But I see the goldfinch as our most vulnerable and deepest secret, perhaps a secret that should be left out in the open and is now too late to divulge to even our most intimate relations. Yet in this secret that we keep to our death, there may lie our essence, our strengths and weaknesses and what defines us the most.

When Theo discovered that Boris had stolen his painting, though he had believed that he was the sole keeper for years and years, he felt an echoing emptiness, as if he’d trick himself to think of his own greatness and had now lost the fiction of his self:

“How could I have believed myself a better person, a wiser person, a more elevated and valuable and worthy-of-living person, a more 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.”

And perhaps, as Theo failed to keep Fabritius’ goldfinch in the end (though he still came out rich because of it), and how Pippa’s morphine lollipop kiss would echo eternally for him, to never experience it again, we will never perhaps never grasp the true meaning of the beauty of an artwork, that we will struggle to grasp the truth of things — that despite of infinite possibilities, we are limited as the goldfinch is by that thin chain on its leg. Though like Theo, a book that we’ve read, an album that we listen to on repeat since high school, a conversation with a friend, or a painting that we keep might give us this savage joy that define us.

And perhaps, despite the chain on our feet that will prevent us to soar lofty heights, that this savage joy is enough for now.