How quickly can the circumstances of one’s life alter? In less than a heartbeat it would seem – or in the brief seconds in which a bomb blast can occur. In her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, ‘The Goldfinch,’ Donna Tartt examines how transitory are the conditions that govern our lives.

Thirteen-year old Theo Decker and his beloved mother seek temporary shelter in New York's Metropolitan Museum during a rainstorm. While inside, a bomb goes off, and Theo’s mother dies in the wreckage. Theo, dazed and possibly suffering from a concussion, lingers at the side of a dying man he’d spotted moments before the blast. The man, Welty, hands Theo an heirloom – a ring – that will ultimately lead Theo to the kindly ‘Hobie.' In his death throes, Welty gestures frantically toward a painting, suggesting to the boy that he wishes him to take it - to save it, one supposes, from being destroyed in the wreckage. The painting is Carel Fabritius’s famous work, ‘The Goldfinch.’ The blast in the museum, the chance meeting of a boy and a dying man, and a 'stolen' masterpiece are the points from which all future events in Theo’s life will stem.

Orphaned, grieving, plagued by survivor’s guilt, Theo goes to live with the family of school friend, Andy Barbour. The Barbours, a wealthy, socially prominent family, are peculiar and oddly broken in some ways. Still, the coolly elegant Mrs. Barbour and her emotionally ill husband give Theo a home of sorts in New York’s elegant Upper West Side, but it proves to be temporary. Soon, Theo’s deadbeat dad and his companion, the flashy Xandra, show up to take Theo back home with them for purposes that turn out to be less than honorable. Home is Las Vegas.

While in Vegas, Theo is on his own. His father’s neglect of his son is stunningly depicted, and Theo, making friends with a cagey Russian boy named Boris, spirals downward into alcoholism and drug addiction.

Eventually, Theo ends up back in New York, this time living with James Hobart, a furniture restorer and the friend and partner of Welty, the dying man Theo had comforted in the museum. Also staying with Hobart from time to time, is Welty’s granddaughter, Pippa, the unattainable redhead who continues to captivate Theo. Now in his twenties, Theo renews his friendship with the Barbours, and begins a shady career of selling restorations as antiques to would-be collectors who have more money than knowledge about what they're buying.

This eventually comes back to haunt him – as does the painting he took from the Museum so many years ago, and which, throughout the book, continues to serve as a catalyst for many of the events in Theo’s life. Improbably, Theo meets up again with Boris in New York, learns that Boris took the painting from him without his knowledge, and that The Goldfinch is probably in Amsterdam, in the possession of criminals. The remainder of the book details Theo’s attempt to regain the painting with Boris’s help.

Tartt's book has been called Dickensian in its scope, and indeed there are elements that will be familiar to readers of Dickens: the orphaned boy (Theo), the Artful Dodger (Boris), the disparity in economic conditions for the poor and rich, and there is even a hint of Miss Havisham in the elderly Mrs. Barbour. I do read Dickens, and on one key point I find Tartt upends the Dickensian comparison: one would be hard-pressed to find in his works the nihilism that Tartt's book espouses. At the heart of Charles Dickens' stories and novels one can always find goodness in the muck, and hope hiding amidst the cesspools of human greed. Tartt looks at life through Theo's eyes and finds nothing but despair.

There is much to like and admire about The Goldfinch.

I like a lengthy book (and make no mistake – this is a very lengthy book, almost 800 pages). I eagerly followed Theo’s journey through most of them.

Tartt stirringly relates the events that occurred immediately following the blast at the museum - you feel the devastation and confusion, the sense of isolation, the fear. She convincingly depicts a child's grief at the loss of the one parent he could depend upon, the fears he experiences at being caught up in the nightmare of Social Services agencies, and his slow but sure drift toward lawlessness and addiction.

And then there were the descriptions of gentle, graceful moments, captured no less vividly than the scenes of horror earlier in the book. She describes the subtle shadings of light gliding across aged patinas and the well-oiled grain of furniture in Hobie’s ‘hospital’ for damaged antiques, the prisms of color filtering through skylights, the delicacy of an artist’s brushstrokes on a canvas. I loved these peaceful descriptions.

I also admired the compelling imagery of the desert surrounding the bright lights of Las Vegas. She eerily interpreted Theo's neighborhood as a vast and scorching ghost town, filled with uninhabited houses in the middle of nowhere. Every day in the desert was the same - mind numbing, soul-destroying. The perfect place to self-destruct. And self-destruct is what Theo did.

My favorite parts of the book dealt with Theo working alongside Hobie, watching him meticulously mend damaged pieces of fine old furniture, losing himself in the process of trying to make the ruins whole again. How apt that Theo would find some measure of peace in Hobie’s workshop since he, too, was in need of mending. But like the antiques that Hobie sought to restore, Theo would never be entirely whole again. Nor would he be authentic, never again ‘the real deal’ – too much has happened to him. He is the walking wounded.

If you’re looking for redemption, you won’t find it in Theo’s journey, which recounts his story from age thirteen to his mid-twenties. With his mother’s death and the ‘theft’ of the painting, his is a downward spiral that never seems to quite reach rock bottom. At book's end, this reader wondered if Theo would one day take his life. Filled with ennui and lack of purpose, still addicted to prescription drugs, one suspects Theo will try again to leave the world behind, in spite of all his high-flown philosophizing at the end of the story. Like his beloved Goldfinch, eternally chained to its perch, Theo is chained to circumstances that were set in motion on that tragic day in the museum. He will forever be defined by those events.

If you’re looking for an uplifting story, this is not it. From start to finish, the story is an unhappy one. And yet, I enjoyed it. I never lost interest in Theo's story or his journey, even in the story's most nihilistic moments.

My reservations about the novel stem entirely from its ending in which Tartt seems to abandon story-telling and instead wraps the conclusion of the book into some sort of touchy-feely fatalism that never quite rings true. Theo's philosophical rhapsodizing seems somehow false, forced. It is self-indulgent and lacking clarity. It is also boring.

Even so, I recommend The Goldfinch – and happily give it 5 stars. Tartt has written a book grand in scope, vivid in imagery, thoughtful, and affecting. If it is not perfect, few things are. It is one of the best books I’ve read in some time, and I won't soon forget Theo's sad odyssey.

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The Goldfinch: A Novel (Pulitzer Prize for Fiction)