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It’s Tartt—But Is It Art?

“Have you read The Goldfinch yet?” Consider it the cocktail-party conversation starter of 2014, the new “Are you watching Breaking Bad ?” Eleven years in the making, 784 pages long, the book has re-ignited the cult of Donna Tartt, which began in 1992 with her sensational debut novel, The Secret History . When The Goldfinch came out, last fall, recipients of advance copies promptly showed off their galleys on Instagram, as if announcing the birth of a child. Her readings sold out instantly. New York’s Frick Collection, which in October began exhibiting the painting for which the book was named, hadn’t seen so much traffic in years. The novel is already on its way to becoming a movie, or a TV series, made by the producers of The Hunger Games. It’s been on the New York Times best-seller list for seven months, sold a million and a half print and digital copies, and drawn a cornucopia of rave reviews, including one in the daily New York Times and another in the Sunday New York Times Book Review. In April it won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, the judges of which praised it as “a book that stimulates the mind and touches the heart.”

It’s also gotten some of the severest pans in memory from the country’s most important critics and sparked a full-on debate in which the naysayers believe that nothing less is at stake than the future of reading itself.

Tartt’s novel The Goldfinch. , by John Manno.

For the few uninitiated, The Goldfinch is a sprawling bildungsroman centered on 13-year-old Theo Decker, whose world is violently turned upside down when, on a trip to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, a terrorist bomb goes off, killing his mother, among other bystanders. At the behest of a dying old man, he makes off with a painting—the 1654 Carel Fabritius masterpiece, The Goldfinch. For the next 14 years and 700 pages, the painting becomes both his burden and the only connection to his lost mother, while he’s flung from New York to Las Vegas to Amsterdam, encountering an array of eccentric characters, from the hard-living but soulful Russian teenager Boris to the cultured and kindly furniture restorer Hobie, who becomes a stand-in father, to the mysterious, waif-like Pippa, plus assorted lowlifes, con men, Park Avenue recluses, and dissolute preppies.

Michiko Kakutani, the chief New York Times book reviewer for 31 years (and herself a Pulitzer winner, in criticism), called it “a glorious Dickensian novel, a novel that pulls together all [Tartt’s] remarkable storytelling talents into a rapturous, symphonic whole. . . . It’s a work that shows us how many emotional octaves Ms. Tartt can now reach, how seamlessly she can combine the immediate and tactile with more wide-angled concerns.” According to best-selling phenomenon Stephen King, who reviewed it for The New York Times Book Review, “ ‘The Goldfinch’ is a rarity that comes along perhaps half a dozen times per decade, a smartly written literary novel that connects with the heart as well as the mind.”

Reading Like a Critic

But, in the literary world, there are those who profess to be higher brows still than The New York Times —the secret rooms behind the first inner sanctum, consisting, in part, of The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, and The Paris Review, three institutions that are considered, at least among their readers, the last bastions of true discernment in a world where book sales are king and real book reviewing has all but vanished. The Goldfinch a “rapturous” symphony? Not so fast, they say.

“Its tone, language, and story belong in children’s literature,” wrote critic James Wood, in The New Yorker. He found a book stuffed with relentless, far-fetched plotting; cloying stock characters; and an overwrought message tacked on at the end as a plea for seriousness. “Tartt’s consoling message, blared in the book’s final pages, is that what will survive of us is great art, but this seems an anxious compensation, as if Tartt were unconsciously acknowledging that the 2013 ‘Goldfinch’ might not survive the way the 1654 ‘Goldfinch’ has.” Days after she was awarded the Pulitzer, Wood told Vanity Fair, “I think that the rapture with which this novel has been received is further proof of the infantilization of our literary culture: a world in which adults go around reading Harry Potter. ”

In The New York Review of Books, novelist and critic Francine Prose wrote that, for all the frequent descriptions of the book as “Dickensian,” Tartt demonstrates little of Dickens’s remarkable powers of description and graceful language. She culled both what she considered lazy clichés (“Theo’s high school friend Tom’s cigarette is ‘only the tip of the iceberg.’ … The bomb site is a ‘madhouse’ ”) and passages that were “bombastic, overwritten, marred by baffling turns of phrase.” “Reading The Goldfinch, ” Prose concluded, “I found myself wondering, ‘Doesn’t anyone care how something is written anymore?’ ” Across the pond, the highly regarded London Review of Books likened it to a “children’s book” for adults. London’s Sunday Times concluded that “no amount of straining for high-flown uplift can disguise the fact that The Goldfinch is a turkey.”

“A book like The Goldfinch doesn’t undo any clichés—it deals in them,” says Lorin Stein, editor of The Paris Review, perhaps the most prestigious literary journal in America. “It coats everything in a cozy patina of ‘literary’ gentility.” Who cares that Kakutani or King gave it the stamp of approval: “Nowadays, even The New York Times Book Review is afraid to say when a popular book is crap,” Stein says.

No novel gets uniformly enthusiastic reviews, but the polarized responses to The Goldfinch lead to the long-debated questions: What makes a work literature, and who gets to decide?

The questions are as old as fiction itself. The history of literature is filled with books now considered masterpieces that were thought hackwork in their time. Take Dickens, the greatest novelist of the Victorian period, whose mantle writers from John Irving to Tom Wolfe to Tartt have sought to inherit. Henry James called Dickens the greatest of superficial novelists … “We are aware that this definition confines him to an inferior rank in the department of letters which he adorns; but we accept this consequence of our proposition. It were, in our opinion, an offence against humanity to place Mr. Dickens among the greatest novelists. . . . He has added nothing to our understanding of human character.” Many future offenses against humanity would follow:

“It isn’t worth any adult reader’s attention,” The New York Times pronounced concerning Nabokov’s Lolita.

“Kind of monotonous,” the same paper said about Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye. “He should’ve cut out a lot about these jerks and all at that crumby school.”

“An absurd story,” announced The Saturday Review of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, while the New York Herald Tribune declared it “a book of the season only.”

That said, for all the snooty pans of books now considered classics, there have been, conversely, plenty of authors who were once revered as literary miracles and are now relegated to the trash heap. Sir Walter Scott, for example, was considered perhaps the pre-eminent writer of his time. Now his work, reverential as it is to concepts of rank and chivalry, seems fairly ridiculous. Margaret Mitchell’s Civil War blockbuster, Gone with the Wind, won the Pulitzer and inspired comparisons to Tolstoy, Dickens, and Thomas Hardy. Now it’s considered a schmaltzy relic read by teenage girls, if anyone.

For many best-selling authors, it’s not enough to sell millions of books; they want respectability too. Stephen King, despite his wild commercial success, has nursed a lifelong gripe that he’s been overlooked by the literary-critical establishment. In 2003, King was given a medal by the National Book Foundation for his “distinguished contribution to American letters.” In his acceptance speech, he took the opportunity to chide all the fancy pants in the room—“What do you think? You get social academic Brownie points for deliberately staying out of touch with your own culture?”—and to ask why they made it “a point of pride” never to have read anything by such best-selling authors as John Grisham, Tom Clancy, and Mary Higgins Clark. Harold Bloom, the most finicky of finicky literary critics, went into a tizzy, calling the foundation’s decision to give the award to King “another low in the process of dumbing down our cultural life” and the recipient “an immensely inadequate writer on a sentence-by-sentence, paragraph-by-paragraph, book-by-book basis.”

Bloom’s fussing had little impact. King was already on his way to the modern canon—his essays and short stories had been published in The New Yorker —and thus he was now in the position to announce who he thought was garbage: James Patterson. “I don’t like him,” King said after accepting a lifetime-achievement award from the Canadian Booksellers Association in 2007. “I don’t respect his books, because every one is the same.” To which Patterson later replied, “Doesn’t make too much sense. I’m a good dad, a nice husband. My only crime is I’ve sold millions of books.”

War of Words

In the long war over membership in the pantheon of literary greatness, no battle had quite the comical swagger of the ambush of Tom Wolfe after the publication of his 1998 novel, A Man in Full, which became a call to arms for three literary lions: Norman Mailer, John Updike, and John Irving. As the English newspaper The Guardian gleefully reported, they were adamant that Wolfe belonged not in the canon but on airport-bookstore shelves (between Danielle Steel and Susan Powter’s Stop the Insanity ). Updike, in his New Yorker review, concluded that A Man in Full “still amounts to entertainment, not literature, even literature in a modest aspirant form.” Mailer, writing in The New York Review of Books, compared reading the novel to having sex with a 300-pound woman: “Once she gets on top it’s all over. Fall in love or be asphyxiated.” (Mailer and Wolfe had a history: Mailer had once remarked, “There is something silly about a man who wears a white suit all the time, especially in New York,” to which Wolfe replied, “The lead dog is the one they always try to bite in the ass.”) Irving said that reading A Man in Full “is like reading a bad newspaper or a bad piece in a magazine. It makes you wince.” He added that on any given page out of Wolfe he could “read a sentence that would make me gag.” Wolfe later struck back. “It’s a wonderful tantrum,” he said. “ A Man in Full panicked [Irving] the same way it frightened John Updike and Norman. Frightened them. Panicked them.” Updike and Mailer were “two old piles of bones.” As for Irving, “Irving is a great admirer of Dickens. But what writer does he see now constantly compared to Dickens? Not John Irving, but Tom Wolfe . . . It must gnaw at him terribly.”

The book of my enemy has been remaindered And I am pleased. In vast quantities it has been remaindered Like a van-load of counterfeit that has been seized

So begins the Australian critic and essayist Clive James’s poem about the writer’s best friends, Schadenfreude and his twin brother, Envy. Leon Wieseltier, the longtime literary editor of The New Republic (where James Wood was a senior editor before moving to The New Yorker ), suggests there might just be a smidge of this at work in the criticism leveled against Tartt. “Tartt has managed to do something that almost never happens: she has created a serious novel—whether you like the book or not, it is not frivolous, or tacky or cynical—and made it into a cultural phenomenon. When a serious novel breaks out, some authors of other serious novels have, shall we say, emotional difficulties.” Curtis Sittenfeld, the best-selling and acclaimed author of Prep and American Wife, similarly observes that critics derive “a satisfaction in knocking a book off its pedestal.”

It’s a theory that holds appeal for authors who feel they’ve been unfairly ignored by critics, and it can lead to surprising, some might even say contorted, rationales. Jennifer Weiner, the outspoken mega-selling author of such “women’s books” as In Her Shoes, Good in Bed, and Best Friends Forever, theorizes that Wood’s review may have been a response to the public’s tepid reception of The Woman Upstairs, by his wife, Claire Messud. “[Messud’s] writing was gorgeous. It was like beautiful carpentry. Everything fit. Everything worked. There wasn’t a single metaphor or simile or comparison you could pull out and say, ‘This doesn’t work,’ the way you can with The Goldfinch. But not many people read that book . . . . The world doesn’t think what she’s doing is as worthy as what Tartt is doing.”

From the beginning, Tartt’s work confused critics. When The Secret History, about an erudite group of classics majors who turn to murder at a small New England college, was published, in 1992, it was greeted with a kind of wonder by writers, critics, and readers—not just because its author was a mysterious, tiny package from Greenwood, Mississippi, who dressed in crisp tailored suits and revealed little about herself, but because few could place it on the commercial-literary continuum. Lev Grossman, the book reviewer for Time and author of the best-selling fantasy series The Magicians, recalls, “You couldn’t classify it easily into high literature or genre fiction. It seemed to come from some other literary universe, where those categories didn’t exist. And it made me want to go to that universe because it was so compelling.” Jay McInerney, who’d had a splashy debut similar to Tartt’s a few years earlier with Bright Lights, Big City, and became friends with her early on, recalls, “I loved it on many levels, not least because it’s a literary murder mystery, but also because it initiates the reader from the outset into a secret club, which is probably what every good novel should do.” In recent years it has been discovered by new readers such as Lena Dunham (creator of HBO’s Girls ), who found in Tartt not only this cool persona—“She reminded me, style-wise, of my mother’s radical-feminist photographer friends in the 80s”—but a master of the tight-group-of-friends tradition.

It took 10 years for Tartt to come out with her next book, The Little Friend, but it was a disappointment to both critics and readers. Was she a one-hit wonder? To prove otherwise she spent the next 11 years, head down, spinning the adventures of Theo Decker, going down byways for as long as eight months that she would ultimately abandon. After the disappointment of her last book, everything was on the line.

The verdict among her fans? Perhaps too long in parts, but the story was as gripping as ever. She is “the consummate storyteller,” says Grossman, who is a new voice leading the charge that certain works of genre fiction should be considered literature. “The narrative thread is one you just can’t gather up fast enough,” he explains.

How Fiction Works

‘There seems to be universal agreement that the book is a ‘good read,’ ” says Wood. “But you can be a good storyteller, which in some ways Tartt clearly is, and still not be a serious storyteller—where, of course, ‘serious’ does not mean the exclusion of the comic, or the joyful, or the exciting. Tartt’s novel is not a serious one—it tells a fantastical, even ridiculous tale, based on absurd and improbable premises.”

For Wood’s crowd the measuring stick in determining what’s serious literature is a sense of reality, of authenticity—and it’s possible even in books that are experimental. In Lorin Stein’s view, best-sellers such as Mary Gaitskill’s Two Girls, Fat and Thin and Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall may stand the test of time “not because a critic says they’re good, but because . . . they’re about real life. . . . I don’t want stage-managing from a novel. I want fiction to deal in the truth.”

It’s a view he may have inherited from his former boss Jonathan Galassi, the president of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, which, along with Alfred A. Knopf, is arguably the most prestigious of publishing houses. (Galassi edits, among others, Jonathan Franzen, Jeffrey Eugenides, Marilynne Robinson, Michael Cunningham, and Lydia Davis.) Determining what’s serious literature isn’t a science, says Galassi, who hasn’t yet read The Goldfinch. The response isn’t fully rationalized, but ultimately a book must be “convincing in some way. It can be emotionally convincing, it can be intellectually convincing, it can be politically convincing. Hopefully it’s all those things. But with someone like Donna Tartt, not everyone is convinced on all levels.”

To Grossman, this slavish devotion to reality is retrograde, and perhaps reviewers like Wood should not be reviewing people like Tartt in the first place. “A critic like Wood—whom I admire probably as much or more than any other book reviewer working—doesn’t have the critical language you need to praise a book like The Goldfinch. The kinds of things that the book does particularly well don’t lend themselves to literary analysis.… Her language is careless in places, and there’s a fairy-tale quality to the book. There’s very little context in the book—it’s happening in some slightly simplified world. Which to me is fine. I find that intensely compelling in a novel. Every novel dispenses with something, and Tartt dispenses with that.” As for Francine Prose’s query “Doesn’t anyone care how a book is written anymore?”: Grossman admits that, with story now king for readers, the answer is no. Wood agrees that that’s the state of things, but finds it sad and preposterous. “This is something peculiar to fiction: imagine a literary world in which most people didn’t care how a poem was written!” (Tartt was not available to comment, but Jay McInerney says she doesn’t read reviews, and isn’t “losing any sleep” over the negative ones.)

Wieseltier has come to a rather more expansive definition of serious literature. “Tartt’s novel, like all novels that purport to be serious, should of course pass before the bar of all the serious critics, and receive all the judgments that they bring forth,” says Wieseltier, who has dipped into the book enough to put it in the serious category. “But if a serious book really catches on, it may be less important that its strictly literary quality is not as great as one might have hoped and more important that it’s touched a nerve, that it is driven by some deep human subject and some true human need.” Ultimately, he thinks, the success of The Goldfinch is a step in the right direction. “When I look at the fiction best-seller list, which is mainly an inventory of junk, and I see a book like this riding high, I think it’s good news, even if it is not The Ambassadors. ”

Indeed, we might ask the snobs, What’s the big deal? Can’t we all just agree that it’s great she spent all this time writing a big enjoyable book and move on? No, we cannot, say the stalwarts. Francine Prose, who took on the high-school canon—Maya Angelou, Harper Lee, Ray Bradbury—in a controversial *Harper’*s essay, “I Know Why the Caged Bird Cannot Read,” argued that holding up weak books as examples of excellence promotes mediocrity and turns young readers off forever. With The Goldfinch she felt duty-bound in the same way. “Everyone was saying this is such a great book and the language was so amazing. I felt I had to make quite a case against it,” she says. It gave her some satisfaction, she reports, that after her Goldfinch review came out she received one e-mail telling her that the book was a masterpiece and she had missed the point, and about 200 from readers thanking her for telling them that they were not alone. Similarly, Stein, who struggles to keep strong literary voices alive and robust, sees a book like The Goldfinch standing in the way. “What worries me is that people who read only one or two books a year will plunk down their money for The Goldfinch, and read it, and tell themselves they like it, but deep down will be profoundly bored, because they aren’t children, and will quietly give up on the whole enterprise when, in fact, fiction—realistic fiction, old or new—is as alive and gripping as it’s ever been.”

Is Donna Tartt the next Charles Dickens? In the end, the question will be answered not by The New York Times, The New Yorker, or The New York Review of Books —but by whether or not future generations read her. Just as a painter can be castigated by his contemporaries and still wind up the most prized painter at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, a writer can sell millions of books, win prizes, and be remembered as no more than a footnote or punch line. It’s a fight that will be settled only on some new version of the Kindle, yet to be designed.

Evgenia Peretz

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Book of the Month: The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt (2013)

Critical Evaluation

“It is dangerous to write openings as compelling as Donna Tartt’s. In The Secret History , the one-page prologue gives us a murder and a narrator who has helped to commit it.  The Little Friend  starts with the death of a child who, by page 15, is found hanging by a piece of rope from a tree branch, his red hair “the only thing about him that was the right colour any more”. And now, in  The Goldfinch , Tartt has a 50‑page two-part opening. In the first section, the narrator, Theo Decker, is holed up in an Amsterdam hotel, looking at newspapers written in Dutch, which he can’t understand; he is searching for his name in articles illustrated with pictures of police cars and crime scene tapes. Before any of this is explained, the story moves back 14 years to the day Theo’s mother dies, when he is on the cusp of adolescence. Her death takes place in New York’s Metropolitan Museum, as a consequence of an exploding bomb – mother and son are in separate rooms when the bomb blast occurs, and the descriptions of Theo regaining consciousness in the wreckage, and trying to find his way out of the ripped-apart museum before returning home, expecting to find his mother there, are written in astonishingly gripping prose. This is, of course, where the danger comes in: if, at the end of the kind of set piece to which the word “climactic” should emphatically apply, you still have 700 pages to go, aren’t you setting your readers up for disappointment?

“Astonishingly, the answer is no.”

Shamsie, Kamila. “The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt – review” The Guardian. 17 October, 2013.

First Excerpt

“While I was still in Amsterdam, I dreamed about my mother for the first time in years. I’d been shut up in my hotel for more than a week, afraid to telephone anybody or go out; and my heart scrambled and floundered at even the most innocent noises: elevator bell, rattle of the minibar cart, even church clocks tolling the hour, de Westertoren, Krijtberg, a dark edge to the clangor, an inwrought fairy-tale sense of doom. By day I sat on the foot of the bed straining to puzzle out the Dutch-language news on television (which was hopeless, since I knew not a word of Dutch) and when I gave up, I sat by the window staring out at the canal with my camel’s-hair coat thrown over my clothes—for I’d left New York in a hurry and the things I’d brought weren’t warm enough, even indoors.

“Outside, all was activity and cheer. It was Christmas, lights twinkling on the canal bridges at night; red-cheeked dames en heren, scarves flying in the icy wind, clattered down the cobblestones with Christmas trees lashed to the backs of their bicycles. In the afternoons, an amateur band played Christmas carols that hung tinny and fragile in the winter air.”

Second Excerpt

“I caught her hand again. ‘Come on,’ I said, ‘we’ll have better luck on the other side.’

“Impatiently we waited for the last few blinks on the Don’t Walk sign. Bits of paper were whirling in the air and tumbling down the street. ‘Hey, there’s a cab,’ I said, looking up Fifth; and just as I said it a businessman ran to the curb with his hand up, and the light popped off.

“Across the street, artists ran to cover their paintings with plastic. The coffee vendor was pulling down the shutters on his cart. We hurried across and just as we made it to the other side, a fat drop of rain splashed on my cheek. Sporadic brown circles—widely spaced, big as dimes—began to pop up on the pavement.

“‘Oh, drat! ‘ cried my mother. She fumbled in her bag for her umbrella—which was scarcely big enough for one person, let alone two.

“And then it came down, cold sweeps of rain blowing in sideways, broad gusts tumbling in the treetops and flapping in the awnings across the street. My mother was struggling to get the cranky little umbrella up, without much success. People on the street and in the park were holding newspapers and briefcases over their heads, scurrying up the stairs to the portico of the museum, which was the only place on the street to get out of the rain. And there was something festive and happy about the two of us, hurrying up the steps beneath the flimsy candy-striped umbrella, quick quick quick, for all the world as if we were escaping something terrible instead of running right into it.”

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Book Reviews

More is more in donna tartt's believable, behemoth 'goldfinch'.

Meg Wolitzer

The Goldfinch

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If you're a novelist who takes a decade or so between books, you can only hope that your readers remember how much they loved you in the past. It's a saturated market out there, and brand loyalty doesn't always extend to novelists.

But ever since the news broke that Donna Tartt's new book The Goldfinch would soon be published, many readers have been waiting in a state of breathless excitement. They've never quite gotten over how much they loved Tartt's 1992 novel, The Secret History , a tale of friendship and murder set at a college, which went on to become not only an international hit but also one of those rare books that are read over and over, in hopes of reliving that initial literary rush.

Would Tartt's latest book inspire the same kind of devotion? After all, she published a second novel, The Little Friend , that was frequently described as a letdown. Is The Goldfinch more like The Little Friend , or — fingers crossed — The Secret History ?

As it turns out, it's not much like either The Secret History or The Little Friend , and if I hadn't known that Donna Tartt had written it, I would never have guessed. This dense, 771-page book tells the story of a boy named Theo Decker, whose mother is killed in a terrorist act early in the novel. In the midst of the trauma and chaos, Theo steals a famous painting, "The Goldfinch," by the Dutch painter Carel Fabritius, setting the sweeping, episodic story in motion.

Several reviewers have compared her book to Oliver Twist , but when I started it I was more reminded of the Harry Potter series (a comparison that is actually made later in the book). The contemporary plot is often nervily improbable and outsized, and Theo, age 13 at the start, is a lot like Harry, in that both boys are gifted, tender-hearted and woefully unsupervised. Theo's scar, while deep and permanent, is of the invisible kind.

Donna Tartt's other works include The Secret History and The Little Friend . Bruno Vincent/Getty Images hide caption

Donna Tartt's other works include The Secret History and The Little Friend .

The day The Goldfinch arrived I promptly cracked it open, remembering how my sons would pounce on the latest Harry Potter on the day it was published. J.K. Rowling transformed a generation of kids into passionate readers. Donna Tartt does something different here — she takes fully grown, already passionate readers and reminds them of the particularly deep pleasures that a long, winding novel can hold. In the short-form era in which we live, the Internet has supposedly whittled our attention-spans down to the size of hotel soap, and it's good to be reminded that sometimes more is definitely more.

So we get a whole lot of Theo here, and also his friend Boris, a kid with a Ukrainian passport and a multi-national history who befriends him after he's forced to leave New York City and go live with his deadbeat dad and his dad's new girlfriend Xandra in a horrible development in Las Vegas. Boris is a great character — totally appealing, a victim of appalling parental neglect, and together he and Theo forge a friendship that's believable, destructive, and comical:

"Don't go!" said Boris, one night at his house when I stood up toward the end of The Magnificent Seven " ... "You'll miss the best part." ... "You saw this movie before?" "Dubbed into Russian, if you can believe it. But very weak Russian. Sissy. Is sissy the word I want? More like schoolteachers than gunfighters, is what I'm trying to say."

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The Las Vegas section is long and detailed, just like all the other sections of this novel. Tartt almost seems to be writing in real time, and yet I was never bored. A series of long set pieces moves the story from the suspenseful opening to the rich, dense, leisurely middle and eventually the action-packed end, which is set in Amsterdam. That part, weirdly, feels as if it was grafted on from a different novel. Or no, it almost feels as if it was grafted on from a particularly literate, stylish indie crime film on the Sundance Channel.

But the occasional disjointedness doesn't affect the overall success of the novel, which absorbed me from start to finish. While The Goldfinch delves seriously and studiously into themes of art, beauty, loss and freedom, I mostly loved it because it kept me wishing I could stay in its fully-imagined world a little longer. Donna Tartt was right to take her time with this book. Readers will want to take their time with it, too.

Meg Wolitzer's latest novel is The Interestings.

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The Goldfinch's artsy fantasia is made drab and boring in its movie adaptation

It can be hard to pinpoint exactly what has gone so wrong with something like The Goldfinch . The overall flavour of disaster has less to do with its obvious technical problems and more with a generalised sense of failure that hangs over proceedings, like The Nothing in The Never-Ending Story . This feeling, this all-pervading malaise, infects every element of the film, lending each scene a faintly stale after-taste; the impression the movie gives off is akin to that of a bad house-party, where the atmosphere somehow never quite coalesces into fun. This isn’t to say that the film doesn’t have glaring individual faults to point and laugh at – indeed almost everything that could go wrong has gone wrong here – but that its general not-quite-there -ness is perhaps its most distressing aspect.

The film opens in Amsterdam with a series of confusing, blurry shots of rain-spattered windows, as adult Theodore Decker ( Ansel Elgort ) reminisces in voice-over about how he came to find himself there. The film then skips backward, to when child Theo (played by Oakes Fegley) came to find himself in possession of a painting, 'The Goldfinch', after a bomb in a museum killed his mother. Already, in these first few minutes, the film displays several of its dispiritingly kitsch hallmarks: a kind of neutral, antiseptic aesthetic; a jittery handle on plot and chronology; shots that waver artsily in and out of focus; and a clumsy rhythm born of poorly alternated short and long sequences. Fegley, looking and acting like a miniature William H. Macy, isn’t an obvious choice for the protagonist, and struggles to anchor the film emotionally in these early scenes as his character moves in with the very wealthy Barbour family. (Casting problems abound, not least in later scenes depicting the friendship between Theo and Boris – a pairing that doesn’t work.)

An early, worrying sign that the film is set to descend to laugh-along levels of dreadfulness comes when Nicole Kidman , playing Samantha Barbour, caresses a signet ring and murmurs, “Lovely… carnelian - the intaglio.” The film would already have enough difficulties even if its cast didn’t have to go mano a mano with this sort of dialogue, which also gives us “I can recommend the poularde” and “Can I speak to Mr Brace-Girdle please”, and which forces Jeffrey Wright, a capable actor, to grapple with the line, “Is that him, the man who gave you the ring? His name was Welty Blackwell.”

Those rococo names lifted straight from Donna Tartt’s acclaimed novel tell you that whatever element of fantasia the book may have been going for, with its world of paintings, music, empty desert houses, drugs and antique furniture, has been lost in translation. The film makes the mistake of presenting all this stuff completely straight up, rendering it drab and absurd, even emo. This is the sort of film where characters discovering a new room walk into it backwards in wonder; where people cry two big tears from the middle of their eyes; where every shot is set-dressed to within an inch of its life with bottles of nail varnish, papier-mâché decorations and intrusively shimmering light fittings. At one point, lacking anything else to stimulate my senses, I became briefly fixated on a pig-shaped ashtray that had erroneously been granted centre stage and which quite naturally proceeded to steal the limelight from its human co-stars.

The story of the painting continues to twist and turn – or should that be stumble and lurch – throughout the film, as child Theo decamps with his stolen painting to Vegas with his estranged father (Luke Wilson) and his father’s girlfriend Xandra (Sarah Paulson), where he meets the aforementioned Boris. Playing teenage Boris, towering over Theo with dark locks and a loud, artificial laugh, Finn Wolfhard gives the lone performance that attempts to inject any welly into things. But the film makes a bad hash of the homoerotic dynamic between the two, which in turn hampers later scenes between Theo and adult Boris (Aneurin Barnard), as the two attempt to recover the painting, now lost to a sketchily depicted criminal underworld. The movie’s late wobble into guns' n’ action, a good two hours into its runtime, acts as a final coup de grâce to any verisimilitude or emotional qualities the film may have aspired to.

These failings mean that the central storyline of an orphaned boy taking refuge in art and love, which should carry a substantial sentimental load, feels strained and remote. Ansel Elgort doesn’t quite reconcile his character’s egotism and vulnerability, so his breakdowns and self-realisation remain of little interest. The film almost wholly fails to convince the viewer of the interest of this story, as evidenced in a late scene that mines the metaphorical qualities of 'The Goldfinch' painting, namely its resilient beauty: this is an aspect of the narrative that the film should have teased out and decorated for our viewing pleasure, but no – the film is content to tell us about it in voice-over.

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The latest book reviews and book news, the goldfinch: book review.

The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt book review

Some books come along and when you read them, they stay with you for a long time. That is how the Goldfinch was for me and I still think about here here and there. See why it has connected with so many people and why it is was made into a movie.

The Goldfinch: Summary

13-year-old  Theodore Decker is visiting the Metropolitan Museum or Art, or MOMA, in New York City with his mother. During the visit, he gets separated from his mother and a bomb goes off killing his mother and numerous other people.

In the rubble, Theo meets a dying old man who points towards the painting The Goldfinch by Carel Fabritius . That also happens to be Theo’s mom’s favorite painting. In a panicked state, Theo grabs the painting and walks out of the museum. 

Theo is taken in and lives with his friend and his wealthy family. He attends school and befriends Boris, a trouble making kid. Eight years later, Theo is working for Hobie at his antique shop. Boris shows up in his life again and reveals a shocking truth related to the painting Theo has hidden away for all those years.

Now, Theo has to right a lot of wrongs that he has done. But it won’t be easy as he gets involved in the underground world of art. He also has to make it up to Hobie for what he has done and come to terms with his mother’s death, something that has shaped his relationships over the years.

I was drawn to The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt by its beautiful book cover. It is a painting of a goldfinch peaking out through a ripped hole. It is genius and innovative. That drew me in and the crazy story of Theo kept me reading it whenever I could.

Donna Tarrt is known to release one novel per decade. But that wait seems to be worth it when she churns out novels that you think about for years. The Secret History is also a favorite of mine and I think even better than the Goldfinch. 

If you haven’t read a Tartt novel , then approach with caution. Her novels are long and tend to be very detailed. I believe it’s to fine-tune her characters and as we know, to really get to know someone, there’s a lot of details involved.

Speaking about the novel itself, I loved the focus on that one event in Theo’s life. It ends up shaping the rest of his life. He really misses his mom and nothing is ever going to ease that pain. The focus on the trauma sets up most of the novel and the poor choices Theo ends up making.  

It may be a long novel but the investment is worth it. You get to see Theo’s life unfold and it is one crazy ride. As a character, Theo is easily forgettable. He doesn’t have any outstanding qualities but you can’t help feel bad for him. Tartt knows how to build a solid backstory and write a great novel too!

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Lovely review! Sharing a link to one of my book post – https://wordpress.com/read/feeds/118548640/posts/3543911787 . You might enjoy reading this book.

I’ve already read it and loved it. Great review!

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I haven’t read The Goldfinch, but I did watch the movie and the story seemed so intriguing, except, yes, it felt like it needed to be fleshed out a lot more, which is where the book comes in I’m sure. I really want to read The Secret History but the length of the book is definitely intimidating me a little!

Thank you for sharing your review!

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BookBrowse Reviews The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt

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The Goldfinch

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• Oct 22, 2013, 608 pages
• Apr 2015, 784 pages

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About This Book

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The Goldfinch is a haunting odyssey that combines vivid characters, mesmerizing language, and breathtaking suspense.

Winner of the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction Her canvas is vast. To frame a story about art, love and morality, Donna Tartt visits two continents and travels across time in a beautifully told (if sometimes sagging) story. The Goldfinch is Theo Decker's bildungsroman - a coming-of-age story painted in bold and powerful strokes. Narrated in the first person by a now 26-year old Theo, he unfolds his life's story after the sudden death of his mother when he was just thirteen. Abandoned by his alcoholic father, the teenager must find shelter and solace where he can. These needs take him from New York City across the country to Las Vegas where he makes the one friend who will stick by him till the very end, a Ukrainian classmate named Boris. Eventually Theo returns to New York and takes up an apprenticeship under the guidance of an antiques furniture restorer named James Hobart. Looming large through these disparate threads is "The Goldfinch" - a haunting seventeenth-century masterpiece by the famous Dutch painter, Fabritius (see Beyond the Book ). Theo comes to possess this piece of art, and it becomes the driver, and the unifier, that moves him through the everyday humdrum of his life. Sadly, it also becomes the cause of his undoing as he gets sucked into the shady world of art crime. At one point in the story, Theo looks at the goldfinch and reflects, "Only occasionally did I notice the chain on the finch's ankle, or think what a cruel life for a little living creature - fluttering briefly, forced always to land in the same hopeless place." The goldfinch, we realize, could well be a metaphor for Theo himself, a spirited soul meant to fly, but constrained by time and circumstance to always land in the "same hopeless place." Donna Tartt, the author of two hugely popular books, especially her spectacular debut, The Secret History , is in fine form here. The Dickensian plot has whiffs of Catcher in the Rye and even Harry Potter ("Hobie," the mentor, reads like Rowling's Dumbledore and Boris even refers to the bespectacled Theo as "Potter"). Some of Tartt's beautifully crafted sentences are worth reading over and over again. In one brilliant smackdown, she manages to distill life's essence down to just a few breathtaking sentences:

Most people seemed satisfied with the thin decorative glaze and the artful stage lighting that, sometimes, made the bedrock atrocity of the human predicament look somewhat more mysterious or less abhorrent. It was rotten top to bottom. Putting in your time at the office; dutifully spawning your two point five; smiling politely at your retirement party; then chewing on your bedsheet and choking on your canned peaches at the nursing home.

Did I like this book? Yes, a fair amount. But I didn't love it as much as the superbly paced and breathtaking The Secret History (for the record, I liked The Little Friend too but The Secret History remains my favorite). The Goldfinch is big and sprawling but it's also messy. The middle portions set in Las Vegas, where Theo and Boris move from one drunken episode to the next, could have used some heavy editing. Frankly I am not sure I would have continued on had The Goldfinch not been a Donna Tartt book, knowing she'd spring a sudden surprise on me toward the end. And boy, does she! A dramatic event happens about two-thirds of the way in that upends the very foundations that the story is built on. It upsets not just Theo, but the reader too, because Tartt has a way of enveloping us completely in her beautifully imagined world. That this plot turn hinges on a slightly far-fetched coincidence, we shall choose to ignore. Towards the very end, Tartt throws out some rapid-fire life lessons and philosophies but it almost reads as if she realizes the story is wrapping up and she now suddenly needs to cram in some pithy material to give the story more heft. As I write this, I realize I had impossibly high expectations for the author. The one problem with being Donna Tartt is that you have to measure up to, well, Donna Tartt. This author knows how to navigate morality's slippery slope. She did so to spectacular effect in The Secret History and there are brief flashes of that brilliance here as well. "There's no sharp line between bad and good," Boris reminds Theo, "that line is often false." Tartt makes her characters dance on a high wire walking this thin divide, sometimes falling, always coming up for air. Arguably her biggest strength lies in the portrayal of her characters, deeply flawed individuals with their moral frailties, yet vulnerable and human enough to have you care about their final outcomes. Above all, The Goldfinch is a vibrant testament to the enduring nature of art and its ability to move your soul. The point of a beautiful thing, Tartt rightly points out, is that it connects us to a larger beauty: "It's not about outward appearances but inward significance. A grandeur in the world, but not of the world, a grandeur that the world doesn't understand." "A really great painting is fluid enough to work its way in to the mind and heart through all kinds of different angles, in ways that are unique and very particular," Tartt reminds us in The Goldfinch . The same can be said for her impressive body of work. Her books have an ability to work their way in to your mind. In that sense, The Goldfinch , too, often meets the parameters of great art: it can reach out across time and talk to only you. Each reader will find in Tartt's latest novel (flaws and all), something "unique, very particular" - and truly her own.

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The New York Times best-selling author of The Nix is back with a poignant and witty novel about marriage, the often baffling pursuit of health and happiness, and the stories that bind us together. From the gritty '90s Chicago art scene to a suburbia of detox diets and home-renovation hysteria, Wellness reimagines the love story with a healthy dose ...

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'The Goldfinch': How is the movie different from Donna Tartt's novel? (Spoilers!)

Spoiler alert! What follows discusses specific plot points from "The Goldfinch," including a moment near the end of the movie. Stop reading now if you haven't seen the film yet and don't want to know.

Bringing a nearly 800-page novel like Donna Tartt's "The Goldfinch" to the movie screen means changes will have to be made.

Even though director John Crowley's drama runs a hefty 2 hours and 26 minutes, there are some differences in the movie ( in theaters now ). A passionate fan of the book, Crowley took great pains to remain faithful to the original Pulitzer Prize-winning material, even if he had to step away from Tartt's linear narrative to make the film more cinematic.

Ansel Elgort stars as the haunted museum-bombing survivor with a secret stolen treasure. Here's what you need to know about the film's changes. 

Seriously, don't read any further unless you're prepared to having things spoiled.

The filmmakers diverted from Donna Tartt's description of Theo's guardian Hobie

James "Hobie" Hobart, Theo's devoted friend and eventual guardian, is described in their first meeting as resembling "antique photos of Irish poets and pugilists" with "his skin an unhealthy white."

Crowley cast African-American "Westworld" star Jeffrey Wright to toil in the Manhattan antique shop as Hobie. Why? Crowley simply saw Wright as the loyal, incorruptible Hobie.

"There’s an inherent decency about Jeffrey that just comes through," he says. "It felt like going against what was literally written on the page, but it felt very true to the spirit of what Donna wrote."

From 'The Goldfinch' to 'Little Women': 8 major books being made into movies soon

Review: 'The Goldfinch' feels like an attractive forgery rather than a real masterwork

Boris is a literal lifesaver in the end

The relationship between the Ukrainian-born Boris Pavlikovsky (played by Finn Wolfhard as a high schooler and Aneurin Barnard as an adult) and Theo (young Oakes Fegley and Elgort) is a model of true friendship enduring under unusual circumstances and a lot of drugs.

In the book, the guilt-ridden adult Boris tracks Theo down in New York City and confesses that he stole "The Goldfinch" (and replaced it with a school book), then lost the painting. In the movie, the two bump into each other at a Russian bar in New York by coincidence and he confesses.

A bigger change comes after Theo waits for Boris for weeks in an Amsterdam hotel after their botched attempt to take the painting back from local criminals. In the book, the depressed Theo ultimately decides to turn himself in to Dutch police for his crimes when Boris shows up and stops him. In the movie, Theo goes through with a suicide attempt, and Boris bursts through the hotel door to rescue his overdosing friend.

Crowley says much of the drama in the final act is happening offstage as Theo waits helplessly in the hotel. So Boris' heroic return served as a screen climax while emphasizing the impact Boris had on Theo.

"Boris entering back into Theo’s life at the end really does save Theo's life," Crowley says. "So it felt like a very true version of the events and allowing Boris to be a little more proactive. It felt like a truthful liberty to take for the drama and seeing the relationship between Boris and Theo through."

So how did the author feel about the changes and the movie? No one knows

She hasn't said a word publicly about the movie and stayed entirely out of the filmmaking. No cameo, no interviews, no premiere red carpet.

Before he was hired, Crowley traveled to North Carolina with producer Nina Jacobson to meet with Tartt over lunch. They talked about the existing script and Crowley's vision for the film, while Tartt kept secretive about her next writing project. 

"So I guess I got the thumbs-up from her since it was announced I was hired the next day," Crowley says. "But that was the only contact I had with her from there on. We were trusted to get on and make the film."

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The Goldfinch: Book Review

Lesser Goldfinch (Photo credit: Images by John ‘K’)

The Goldfinch Donna Tartt Winner, Pulitzer Prize for Fiction 2014

Spoilers ahead.

“To write a novel this large and dense…is equivalent to sailing from America to Ireland in a rowboat, a job both lonely and exhausting…— Stephen King , reviewing The Goldfinch in The Guardian

If reading fiction is an escape from reality, I’m having trouble with re-entry. It’s been over a week since I finished The Goldfinch , yet it’s still one of the first things I think of in the morning and return to several times during the day. Somewhere around page two or three hundred I took up residence in the world created by Donna Tartt, and I’ve yet to move out. (“… with very great paintings it’s possible to know them deeply, inhabit them almost …” —from The Goldfinch .)

The Goldfinch however, is no escape: it thrusts us into the awareness, always just beneath the surface, that the only way out of our troubled lives is death, a truth most of us tend to avoid. When forced to face it, our reactions can range from depression to terror to thoughts of suicide (as in might as well get it over with ). I don’t know if this was Tartt’s intention, but it was, at least for me, the novel’s ultimate statement. Not that she doesn’t offer glimmers of joy and hope along the way, particularly in her long summary-like ending: but the dark side decidedly overpowers the light.

A plot-driven novel, The Goldfinch is full of twists and turns and moments of heightened suspense. Unlike most plot-driven books (see John Grisham , James Patterson, Nora Roberts , et al ), in which the action is fueled by stereotypical cardboard characters, The Goldfinch is populated by multi-dimensional  human beings: Theo, the narrator around whom all others spin; Boris, his chief sidekick, dragged all over the world by his abusive businessman father; Pippa, the girl Theo falls in love with moments before a bomb goes off in the New York Metropolitan Museum, setting the plot in motion; and dozens more. I can still vividly picture every one of these characters, though Tartt, thankfully, allows readers to fill in most of our own visuals—which is odd, considering she’s so heavy on other kinds of description.

As both a reader and writer I’ve never been that interested in description, whether of city streets or country roads, lavish mansions or run-down hovels. Thus, Tartt’s long, elaborate word paintings of whatever’s going on while what’s really going on goes on annoyed the hell out of me—that is, for the first hundred pages or so, until I fully surrendered.The plot is so engaging that I’d impatiently scan the page (or rather Kindle screen), my nerves twitching with the feeling of  Come on , get to the story already ! For instance, just as Boris is about to tell Theo (and us) what’s become of the treasured painting at the center of the plot, Tartt leaves the conversation momentarily to let us know what’s showing on the TV set in the bar. She’s also big on that famous plot device, the flashback: after the explosion, when Theo crawls through a collapsed passageway seeking an exit, Tartt flashes back to a time when he was stuck in another tight space. Sometimes she even writes a flashback within a flashback.

At such moments I became distracted and annoyed, and read as quickly as possible to get past what I saw as “extra”s…but then a funny thing happened on my way back to “the story”: I began to notice that my impatience was similar to what happens during suspenseful passages; Tartt’s long flights of description left me literally suspended. I was desperate to know what would happen next: I had to turn the pages. Eureka! Are these literary devices—the descriptions, the flashbacks—purposeful techniques employed precisely to create suspense? Is her deftness with these methods partly what makes the book so compelling? Perhaps. No, more than perhaps: probably. It’s worth noting that The Goldfinch is only Donna Tartt’s third published novel, and that she spent eleven years writing it. At a time when would-be authors attend workshops on “How to Write A Bestseller in a Weekend” and toss off a book in six months’ time, Donna Tartt is holding down the fort of literary excellence.

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• Five Things You Should Know Before Reading The Goldfinch: This is one of the truest things I’ve read about the book.

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2 responses »

This is a superb post! I absolutely loved The Goldfinch, and your thoughts on the novel have made all my favourite things about it come back to me.

I loved the layering of the characters, and how each had such a complex mix of fears, worries and dreams at play in their mind. The psychological effects of the trauma on Theo and Pippa is probably most obvious to consider, as well as interesting to compare and contrast between the two of them, but I’d say that all the characters have something that troubles them.

Then there’s the sheer beauty of the novel. I love how art acts as a theme and runs through the writing itself. I put down some thoughts on this in a quick review I did over on my blog, although it was impossible to fit everything in one blog post really!

The novel is simply put together so well, and I really think it deserves all the praise it’s been getting. I’m so glad you enjoyed it too!

I’m so glad we have similar feelings about this book, since I’ve been pestering you to read it, not knowing you already did! I was curious about the perspective of someone who reads fiction in part for its therapeutic value, so I appreciate knowing your POV. Thanks!

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Book Review: The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt

Donna Tartt’s latest novel is a Bildungsroman in all its coming-of-age glory, as Theo Dekker works his way through a world as messy and disorientating as our own. After an explosion in the city-machine of New York kills Theo’s mother, his estranged father comes to reclaim him from the arms of the Big Apple’s elite. He is relocated to the eerie suburbs of Las Vegas with nothing but a stolen painting of a goldfinch to remind him of the life he once led. The recognisable clutter and confusion of everyday life are perfectly captured, intensified through the unease of a young boy in the wake of loss.

The stolen painting, while central to the narrative, often fades into the background of Theo’s life. I found myself forgetting about it altogether—as Theo occasionally does—so absorbing is Tartt’s evocation of the semi-deserted Las Vegas suburbs. When Theo befriends the “Barbarian Prince” Boris—a Russian Artful Dodger to Theo’s displaced Oliver Twist—the painting is disregarded completely as Theo attempts to negotiate the complexities of his new life, egged on by his charismatic new friend.

You can look at a picture for a week and never think of it again. You can also look at a picture for a second and think of it all your life

Along with The Luminaries , The Goldfinch cemented 2013 as a year for beautifully written but vast novels. The Goldfinch is around eight hundred pages long, and part of the joy of reading a book so expansive is the devotion it demands and it is rewarded. Years pass, characters grow, we are swept away with the bit-part players that come and go in Theo’s life.

Some critics, presumably desperate to analogise, have discussed Theo as a Harry Potter figure; he is the ‘boy who lived’ indeed, but hardly a wizard out to fight evil. He’s far too complex for such a fairytale comparison. Those who have heralded the work as Dickensian are closer. It’s easy to see The Goldfinch as a reimagined Great Expectations , for part of the fascination of this novel is in the sheer detail of every character Tartt creates. Every person in the novel is fully formed, from walk-on eccentrics to major players., The bit-parts delight because, dropping in and out over hundreds of pages, they take on roles rarely captured well in a novel: casual acquaintances, rarely-seen friends. The people who become significant with time, not because of the contrivances of plot. It’s rare to find a writer who spends so much time becoming acquainted with every cast member; rare still for such attention to detail to be so invigorating.

Theo’s impetuous you-only-live-once theft may represent the promise of the present, but The Goldfinch is also concerned with the past, and the manner in which memories shape us, often while we are unaware. In the book’s opening passage Theo dreams of his mother, who represents an alternative world: another life in which he might remain secluded and happy, content in the big city, visiting art galleries, casually devouring culture and appraising antiques. But with his mother only a memory, these things are distorted. The painting of the goldfinch represents impulsive youth but is also a last thread of what-could-have-been. Folded up and secreted in a pillowcase, the painting becomes a guilty secret which taints event positive memories. The tender passages detailing Theo’s final moments with his mother are beautifully sad but what the reader wonders about most is what will become of the stolen painting, the painting that Theo has yet to understand and maybe never will.

Every new event—everything I did for the rest of my life—would only separate us more and more: days she was no longer a part of, an ever-growing distance between us. Every single day for the rest of my life, she would only be further away.

This story will change you, mostly because of its honesty. After you’ve read it, you’ll remember sections as though you’re recalling something a friend told you about. How that one time he had to take a coach journey with a dog; how petrified he was that it would annoy someone and he’d be thrown off. Even such apparently mundane moments are suspenseful, and take on a wonderful clarity at Tartt’s touch. There’s an eloquence in the most trivial events. It should come across as self-indulgent, but it ends up being deeply moving. We see the world from Theo’s perspective and Tartt never lets the mask slip for a moment. We are fixed in the world of the protagonist.

To understand the world at all, sometimes you could only focus on a tiny bit of it, look very hard at what was close to hand and make it stand in for the whole…

In this way Theo becomes the Goldfinch of the title. A small lonely bird, tethered by a chain he does not see, attempting to spread his wings in a world he does not understand. It spoils nothing and comes as no surprise that Theo outlives both his parents. His inability to unfetter himself from such experiences shapes the novel. Theo never actually gets to leave the nest at a time of his own choosing; instead, he is thrown from it. He is without shelter and he cannot fly.

At times it seems as though Tartt is in danger of overreaching. The Goldfinch is long, varied, spread across all corners of the Earth, involved with all classes and all manner of social situations. It is a novel about relationships in all their stages, all their forms, making, breaking, reviving, consuming, abusive, obtrusive, elusive. Yet through this confusion there is a thread of clarity. The aspects of the novel that could have been its weak points are actually its strongest: its size, the inwardness of its narrator, its eclectic cultural references. The Goldfinch will leave you exhausted, both from carrying it around and from the mental energy Tartt demands that you invest in her characters. This is a book that calls for complete immersion—but it is well worth the effort.

A great sorrow, and one that I am only beginning to understand: we don’t get to choose our own hearts. We can’t make ourselves want what’s good for us or what’s good for other people. We don’t get to choose the people we are.

The Goldfinch is available now.  Buy it from Foyles .

About Thea Hawlin

Theodora (Thea) Hawlin is assistant editor and production manager of The London Magazine.

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Book Review

The goldfinch.

• Donna Tartt
• Contemporary , Drama

Readability Age Range

• Little, Brown and Company, a division of the Hatchette Book Group Inc.
• Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, 2014; Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, 2014

Year Published

The Goldfinch by Author Donna Tartt has been reviewed by Focus on the Family’s marriage and parenting magazine .

Plot Summary

Theo Decker is an average 13-year-old living on the fringes of affluent society with his mother in New York City. His father abruptly left them the year before. His dad was an argumentative alcoholic; both Theo and his mother are happier without him. They have a close bond, but Theo is not perfect. As the novel opens, he and his mother are on the way to the prestigious private high school he attends to talk to the principal about his suspension for smoking on school property.

As Theo and his mother walk uptown to his school, they stop into a museum to wait out a sudden rainstorm. With only a short time before the meeting, his mother hurries to show Theo some of the important paintings. Theo is more intrigued by a girl he sees walking with an older gentleman. When his mother stops at her favorite painting, “The Goldfinch” by Fabritius, he listens to her explain the painter’s history and the picture’s significance.

But Theo is still entranced by the girl. So much so, that when his mother wants to run into another gallery, Theo tells her he is going to the gift shop, just so he can follow the girl and maybe speak to her. His mother hurries away, but Theo is near the girl and her guardian when a terrorist’s bomb explodes and the world fades to black.

When Theo wakes up, he is disorientated. The old man lies near him. In a daze, the man begs Theo to save “it.” Theo sees him point to “The Goldfinch.” The man seems panicked that “they” might steal it and put it in the customs house, so Theo hides the painting in a shopping bag. The old man then gives Theo a ring and tells him to go to Hobart and Blackwell and buzz the green bell. Theo pockets the ring and stays by the man until the man passes out.

Unable to find his mother in all the smoke and debris, Theo picks up the shopping bag and makes his way back to their apartment, as that is their emergency rendezvous. Overnight, social workers arrive and inform him that his mother was killed in the explosion. While they try to track down his father and grandparents, Theo is brought to the only friend whose address he can remember, Andy Barbour.

Andy and Theo had bonded for a time in elementary school when both boys had been outcasts and bullied. Theo had managed to recover from that time and been accepted by his peers in high school. Andy remained a social pariah. Andy and his parents welcome Theo into their home, but his younger siblings, Toddy and Kitsey, resent his intrusion.

Over the coming weeks, Theo walks through life in a cloud of grief, while the social workers try to find his father. He is also given medication from a psychiatrist, and from Mrs. Barbour, to help him sleep and cope with the anxiety caused by the bombing. The only emotion that breaks through his fog is that of fear when he thinks about the painting he left back at his old apartment. He knows he should turn it in to the authorities, but he worries about the repercussions.

Theo begins to wonder about the ring the old man had given him. After unsuccessfully trying to contact a shop with the name Hobert and Blackwell by phone, Andy advises him to try visiting the shop. Theo rings the green bell and is welcomed into the cluttered antique shop by James Hobert — Hobie to his friends.

Hobie takes the ring and tells Theo it was his business partner’s, Welty Blackwell, but the old man did not survive his injuries. Theo is allowed a brief visit with Pippa, the girl who had accompanied Welty to the museum. She had been Welty’s ward and niece. They had all lived together above the antique shop, and Hobie is helping Pippa recuperate from her injuries. She suffered a shattered leg, broken skull and brain injuries. Theo begins to visit the shop on a regular basis to speak with Hobie and Pippa. Hobie teaches Theo about restoration and antiques.

Theo is crushed when Pippa’s aunt moves her to Texas to continue her recuperation, but he continues to enjoy Hobie’s company. Hobie’s friendship and instruction is a balm to Theo’s soul, and his grief begins to lessen. But his world is turned upside down again when his father arrives unannounced at the Barbours’ apartment and insists on taking Theo to his home in Las Vegas. Theo returns to his old apartment with his father and his father’s new girlfriend, Xandra. As Xandra and his dad quickly decide what they can sell or use in Las Vegas, Theo secretly places “The Goldfinch” into a suitcase and jams it full of clothes.

Having never been out of New York City for more than a holiday, Las Vegas is like another world. His father and Xandra work odd hours and live in a large house in an empty neighborhood. Eventually, Theo makes friends with Boris, the son of a Russian businessman, who speaks several languages and has lived in many countries. The two are soon inseparable and spend their nights getting drunk, smoking pot and doing any kind of drugs they can get their hands on when they get money.

A year passes by without Theo noticing because of his constant drug use. His relationship with his father improves a bit, as his father no longer drinks, but he does take prescription painkillers. For a while, his father makes a lot of money at the casinos. He also does some sports betting.

When a man comes to the door and questions Theo about his dad, he knows things have taken a turn for the worse. In a drugged panic, Theo wraps “The Goldfinch” in paper and packing tape and hides it in his school locker, until his father assures him there is nothing to worry about.

Then one afternoon, his father asks Theo to call the lawyer in charge of his mother’s estate. He tells Theo he needs some money so he can send him to a private school. Theo hesitates, and his father hits him several times, demanding he cooperate. When the solicitor tells Theo that the money has to be sent directly to the school, his father breaks down in horrifying sobs. The following day, Theo’s father dies in an alcohol-related accident.

Still reeling from the effects of the LSD he and Boris did the night before, Theo becomes paranoid and desperate to return to New York before Xandra can call social services. Boris tries to get Theo to wait a day, but Theo refuses. While Xandra is passed out, they raid her bureau and discover a stash of cash and drugs. They split it, and Theo boards a bus bound for New York City. Desperate to find a place to stay, Theo shows up on Hobie’s doorstep, and the old man takes him in.

Over the next 10 years, Theo learns the ins and outs of the antique business and becomes Hobie’s business partner. Unbeknownst to Hobie, however, Theo sells several of Hobie’s hybrid restorations as original antiques. The ruse helps to get the shop out of debt. The money also helps pay for Theo’s prescription drug addiction. Although highly functioning, he cannot make it more than a few days without the numbing effect of some drug or another.

Trouble arises when a customer calls Theo out on a fake antique he bought. The man further suspects Theo has “The Goldfinch” and that he and Hobie have been using it to scam money, as the painting recently turned up in a foiled drug deal in Miami, but was lost again. As Theo has kept the painting hidden in a vault for years, he can believably deny the claim. Theo admits his fraudulent antique dealings to Hobie, who makes him promise to track down customers and repay them.

On top of this business crisis, Theo’s love life is in turmoil. Although in love with Pippa, she does not appear to love him, so he has become engaged to Andy’s sister, Kitsey Barbour. The match helps Mrs. Barbour get over her grief of losing Andy and her husband in a boating accident. As their engagement party draws near, Theo discovers that Kitsey is in another relationship with an old schoolmate Theo dislikes.

Theo takes a walk through the streets of the city, trying to clear his head, and is shocked to stumble across his old friend Boris. It is apparent that Boris now has a lot of money and is involved in some illegal activities. Theo is incredulous when Boris admits to having stolen “The Goldfinch” from Theo’s locker and having replaced it with a text book wrapped in the same paper and packing tape. It was he who used the painting in the Miami drug deal. Boris promises to help Theo get it back.

Boris sets up an intricate plan in Amsterdam and forces Theo to pretend to be a rich American art collector who wants to buy the painting. Once the painting is back in his hands, however, associates of Boris steal it back. A shootout ensues, and Boris is shot in the arm.

Theo and Boris each kill one of their assailants, and a third man gets away with the painting. Boris knows the young man who stole it and leaves Theo behind while he tries to get it back. Theo hides out in an Amsterdam hotel for a week, sick with fever and high on drugs, until Boris returns for him with a lot of money. Boris had decided to take Theo’s initial advice and call the authorities with the information he had about the painting’s whereabouts, and as the painting was recovered, they were given several million dollars as a reward.

Theo returns to New York and confesses everything to Hobie, expecting to be cast out forever. Instead, he and Hobie remain friends, and Theo spends the next year flying around the world, using the money to quietly buy back all the fake antiques he sold.

Christian Beliefs

Preparations are made to celebrate Christmas, but the religious meaning to the season is not discussed. Theo has a snide thought about how his mother, asking the opinion of her boss, is akin to asking, “What would Jesus do?” Hobie had been brought up Catholic and served as an altar boy. He has fond memories of a Jesuit father who had stopped his father from beating him.

Theo’s mother lived with an embittered aunt after her parents died. The aunt had been raised Catholic but left the church for a cult that did not allow her to drink tea or take aspirin. The aunt told his mother that people who did not fear the Lord always got what they deserved. Mrs. Barbour looks at Rembrandt paintings of St. Peter and remarks how Peter looked dutiful and good, yet still with a hint of a betrayer in him.

While in Amsterdam, high and anxiously waiting for word from Boris, Theo contemplates different religious views of worry, including Jesus’ words to “consider the lilies of the field” (Luke 12:27). When Boris returns, on Christmas Day, he offers a toast to glorify Christ on the day He was born. He offers another to the graciousness of God. He tells a mixed up Bible story about a thief who steals a widow’s mite, but then invests it and returns to give her the money he made and together they ate the fatted calf.

Theo recalls how insurance companies use the term “an act of God” to describe a catastrophe.

Other Belief Systems

Theo learns the Barbour family had ancestors in Salem, and he wonders if they might be descended from witches. Xandra learned how to do witchcraft out of book from her high school library. A taxi driver has various religious paraphernalia hanging from the rearview mirror including a turbaned guru.

Theo’s father knows about the Chinese lore of numbers. He tells Xandra that eight is a lucky number in China. He says that number patterns create energy. They are a meeting of earth and heaven. After a particularly good day of gambling, Theo’s dad comments that Mercury was in retrograde and the moon high, so he couldn’t lose. His father also believes in astrology signs and how they affect personalities. His father once used the term rotten luck to explain something.

Theo and Pippa discuss how someone’s birthday might have to do with luck and whether either of them would ever go to a palm reader. Boris once converted to the Muslim faith because he thought the people were nice to him. He does not believe in God or Allah. He believes Islam is a religion of peace. He gives up being a Muslim because he likes to drink and does not want to be disrespectful to true believers.

Authority Roles

Theo’s mother treats her son very well and tries to provide him with a well-rounded education, even with her limited means. The Barbours provide Theo with an unaffectionate but stable home life for as long as he lives with them. Theo’s father is a self-absorbed addict. He never goes food shopping. Theo becomes so malnourished that the school nurse gives him a special vitamin shot and chewable vitamins.

In the year that Theo lives with his father, the two have a few interactions, but most are not positive. The positive interactions appear to come only after his father has a particularly good run at the casinos. It seems the only reason his father returns for him is to get hold of his ex-wife’s belongings so he can sell them for money. Hobie is the only adult to provide Theo with a sense of value and belonging.

Profanity & Violence

The story is filled with profanity. God’s name is used in vain alone and with Jesus , d–n , sake , oh , forsaken , knows , thank and good . Jesus and Christ are used in vain. Lord is also used as an exclamation alone and with good . The f-word is used extensively and in various parts of speech, alone and with the words mother and off . S— , h—- , bulls— , d–n and b–ch are used. The word a– is used alone and with hole , pain-in-the and sharp . B–tard is used alone and with holy . A woman is called a c–t . Other objectionable words are a variation of the n-word, faggot , twat , d–k , d–khead , gay , arse , sucks , shite , jeez , slut , prick , bint , bazooms , tits and darn .

The bomb that kills Theo’s mother also kills many other people. Theo suffers a head wound that gives him headaches, but he is not taken to a doctor for several days. His face, hands and knees are cut. The bomb severely burns the old man’s (Welty’s) face. As he talks to Theo, blood foams out of his mouth. Welty eventually dies from his wounds.

As Theo makes his way out of the wreckage, he sees a hand sticking out from under two chunks of concrete. He sees many bodies sprawled on the floor as if they had fallen from a great height. In the gallery where his mother had been, he recognizes the corpses of other museum patrons he had seen earlier. Theo is later told by social workers that his mother had been hit in the head with flying debris and killed instantly. When the social workers tell him he is to be placed in a foster home, Theo thinks about a news story in which twins were raped and starved by their foster father.

Theo’s father hits him in the face several times and threatens to break his arm if Theo will not call his solicitor and ask for money to be transferred to his bank account. His father is killed when he drives drunk and veers his car into oncoming traffic.

When he was younger, Theo used to worry if his mother was late coming home from work. He thought she might have been pushed in front of a train or stabbed by a bum. Theo and Andy were bullied in elementary school. They were tripped, thrown into lockers, kicked and punched. Andy had almost been suffocated when someone put a plastic bag over his head at recess. Another boy gave Andy a concussion when he shoved his head against the school’s shower stall. Another student tried to put a stick of deodorant up Theo’s rectum. For Andy, the bullying continued at home. His older brother would spit on his food, leave autopsy photos on his pillow and even urinate on Andy while he slept.

Boris describes how he once saw a man shot in the streets of Ukraine. Theo watches helplessly through a window as Boris’ father brutally beats his son. He strikes Boris with his cane across his back, kicks him when Boris falls to the ground and then repeatedly strikes him in the face with his ringed hand. Finally, he hits Boris in the face with the curved handle of his cane. After the brutal attack, the boys get drunk and go to Theo’s house.

Boris lashes out at Theo when he carelessly tries to clean Boris’ wounds. The friends end up in a drunken brawl, half-serious, half-joking, and they end up in the pool. Boris grabs hold of Theo’s ankle and pulls him under the water, causing Theo to have a panic attack as he remembers the suffocating experience of trying to get out of the museum. Boris’ nose begins to gush blood from his father’s beating.

Boris tells Theo about how his girlfriend, Kotku, beat up a girl, pulling out bloody chunks of her hair. Theo’s father used to be beaten with a belt by his father. Hobie had also been severely beaten by his father as a young boy. The local priest had been called in, and he punched Hobie’s father to the ground to get him to stop the beating. The priest had seen welts on Hobie’s back in the past.

Andy’s older brother once hit a boy in the face with a lacrosse stick.

In Amsterdam, Boris is shot in the arm before he shoots his assailant in the head. Part of the assailant’s skull and brain hit Theo. Theo fires a gun and is shocked when he hits another assailant in the shoulder. He fires again and shoots the man in the head, causing an explosion of blood.

Sexual Content

While Pippa is recuperating from her injuries, she sits up and gives Theo a kiss. Xandra sits up from sunbathing and flashes her breasts toward Theo before refastening her bikini top. Boris admits to having had sex with a stranger in a parking lot when he was 14.

Theo remembers having a sexual relationship with an engaged woman of 27 when he was 16. Although not described in detail, he does say that he did not love the woman, but enjoyed the sexual act. Afterward, he felt empty. He feels the same way about his sexual relationship with his fiancée, Kitsey.

Hobie tells Theo all about Welty’s father’s promiscuity — how the man carried on with waitresses, hairdressers and his friends’ daughters. Boris’ girlfriend, Kotku, is described as a girl who will sleep with anyone, including other girls. Boris is warned he may get a sexually transmitted disease from her. When Boris starts to spend his nights with Kotku, Theo starts watching porn on television. Boris tells how Kotku ran away from home when her mother’s boyfriend abused her. She made money by giving blowjobs to men on the street. Boris tells how one of his high school friends gave him a handjob in her little brother’s bedroom when she was high on drugs. After the initial art deal in Amsterdam, Boris thinks they should celebrate by getting blowjobs.

Theo describes how other prescription drug addicts recognized his problem. An older male business associate and addict would hit on him. One of the girls he slept with also had an addiction. Theo had an intimate relationship with a girl already engaged to another man. It is not described in detail.

Boris suggests that Hobie may be homosexual, a theory that Theo never proves but about which he always wonders. Theo has distorted memories of intimate encounters with Boris. In their drunken and drugged states they engaged in homosexual behavior that is not described in detail.

Discussion Topics

Additional comments.

Alcohol: There are too many instances of alcohol abuse to list here, but parents should know that almost the entire year Theo spent in Las Vegas, (approximately 150 pages of the novel) is one long orgy of alcohol and drugs between Theo and Boris. The boys drink beer, wine, champagne and vodka. Every adult in the novel also drinks on occasion, usually wine or cocktails. Theo’s father is an alcoholic who stops drinking, but then self-medicates with prescription drugs.

Drugs: Theo becomes addicted to prescription drugs and takes them almost daily. The drugs primarily vary between things like oxytocin and morphine. He and Boris regularly smoke marijuana. They also indulge on occasion by taking cocaine, ecstasy and LSD. After Theo leaves Las Vegas, Boris sells drugs to other students for a drug dealer. Theo tells about sniffing glue when he was younger to get high.

Stealing: Before his mother died, Theo and his best friend, Tom, would break into houses and steal beer, petty cash, video games and DVDs. Theo and Boris regularly shoplift junk food because neither of their parents keep food in the house. Theo also steals by selling Hobie’s reproduction furniture as real antiques.

The entire plot of the novel revolves around the fact that Theo unintentionally steals “The Goldfinch” from the museum as a young man and then doesn’t want to give back the painting or doesn’t know how to give the painting back without getting in trouble with the law.

Tobacco: Many characters, including Theo, smoke cigarettes.

Lying: Theo lies to Hobie about how many of his reproductions he has sold. He lies to authorities about where he was in the museum so they will not suspect he stole the painting. He lies to his fiancée because he knows he does not love her.

Movie Tie-In: Producers often use a book as a springboard for a movie idea or to earn a specific rating. Because of this, a movie may differ from the novel. To better understand how this book and the movie differ, compare this book review with Plugged In’s movie review for The Goldfinch .

You can request a review of a title you can’t find at [email protected] .

Book reviews cover the content, themes and worldviews of fiction books, not their literary merit, and equip parents to decide whether a book is appropriate for their children. The inclusion of a book’s review does not constitute an endorsement by Focus on the Family.

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How Faithful Is the Goldfinch Movie to Donna Tartt’s Book?

We break it down..

Here’s a conundrum: How is it that The Goldfinch the novel got stellar reviews (not to mention a Pulitzer Prize), and The Goldfinch the movie, despite being a remarkably faithful adaptation of the story, very much has not ? Unfortunately, we’re not gonna be able to answer that right now. If anyone could solve the problem of adaptation once and for all, it would no doubt be worth more than the work of art at the center of this story, a 17 th -century painting of a chained goldfinch by a Dutch master. What we are here to do is tell you exactly where the book and film diverge.

Most often, the answer is that the movie, even at two-and-a-half hours long, can’t fit in as much as does the 800-page novel, forcing director John Crowley and screenwriter Peter Straughan to pare down a bit on details, characters, and plot. Remember, we’re going through the whole movie and the whole book, so don’t say we didn’t warn you about spoilers .

In both the book and the movie, the story begins, of course, when a boy named Theo (played as a tween by Oakes Fegley and as an adult by Ansel Elgort) steals The Goldfinch from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in the chaotic few moments after a bombing kills his mother and ruptures his world. The main difference between the book version of Theo’s mom (Hailey Wist) and the movie version is how much better we get to know her and how much more time we get to spend with her in the book. In the movie, we never learn her first name (Audrey), and we don’t even see her face till the end. The book paints her as someone who was beloved by her son and doormen alike, which makes it all the more devastating when she dies, but in the movie, most of that is left up to our imaginations.

Toward the end of the movie, it’s treated as a bit of a revelation that The Goldfinch was Theo’s mom’s favorite painting, whereas it’s right there in the early parts of the book. We also find out that as a child, Theo’s mother was afraid of The Anatomy Lesson , the painting she goes to look at right before the bomb goes off and therefore the reason she and Theo aren’t together when the bombing happens.

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After the Bombing

In the book, Andy (Theo’s old friend whose family he is sent to live with) and Theo get along well from the get-go, but in the movie, they’re awkward together at first.

In both versions, meanwhile, one of the people who died in the bombing was a man named Welty, and right before, Theo have a conversation in which Welty gives Theo a ring. In the movie, there are no indications that Theo doesn’t remember the conversation; Theo explains the ring when Mrs. Barbour finds it. In the book, the ring helps Theo remembers the name “Hobart and Blackwell,” which leads him to the antique store where he meets Hobie, his eventual caretaker.

Though Tartt describes Hobie as white (the novel compares him to “antique photos of Irish poets and pugilists”) as well as exceedingly tall (“six foot four or six five, at least”), the movie casts Jeffrey Wright, who is black and around 5-foot-11. Still, in personality, Hobie is pretty much the same.

The book portrays more of Theo’s life after he leaves his father’s house in Las Vegas and goes to live with Hobie in New York. During this period, Theo studies to get into a prep school, Hobie becomes Theo’s guardian, and Theo sees Pippa, a fellow survivor, again—he is portrayed keeping in touch with her and his friend Boris in a shallow way via texting. Theo gets into a prep school, but instead of being a good student, he begins learning the antiques trade from Hobie.

Theo learns more about Pippa’s family backstory in the novel: Her mother, Juliet, died of cancer, and Welty was her mother’s brother; they shared a cruel father. Also in the book and not the movie, Theo and Pippa kiss before she leaves to live with her aunt.

Most of the changes to Boris’ character between the book and film are just the result of the book being able to contain more detail. For example, in the book, Boris’ father alternates between affection and violence; in the movie, we only see the latter, and even that we only see briefly. The movie also skips the part of the book where Theo and Boris’ relationship gets strained because Boris gets a girlfriend, Kotku, but in both cases Theo doesn’t realize that Boris has stolen The Goldfinch from him. There’s no such character in the movie.

Getting The Goldfinch Back

In the book, Theo and Boris reunite after Boris runs after him down the street—rather than inside a bar, where they meet in the movie (and where Theo’s only gone to get drugs, incidentally). Boris reveals to Theo in the book that he sought him out; the movie treats their meeting as if it might be a coincidence. Also, the movie completely leaves out the character Horst, Boris’ associate in art crimes who has an apartment full of forged art.

Amsterdam/The Ending

In the book, Theo does heroin while holed up in the hotel in Amsterdam, distraught about coming so close but failing to recover the painting. There’s no heroin in the movie; Theo instead abuses pills. In the book, Theo has a vision of Andy in a dream during this period; this isn’t in the movie. In the book, Theo thinks about killing himself or turning himself in, but Boris interrupts him before he does anything; in the movie, Theo takes enough pills to kill himself, but Boris finds him in his hotel room and rescues him.

When book Theo returns home after Amsterdam, he has a talk with Hobie about what he was doing with the restored antiques and how to make everything right. The movie is more open-ended: You just see him show up as Hobie is trimming the Christmas tree. Both the book and movie leave as an open question what will happen with Theo’s romantic life: He doesn’t love Kitsey, his fiancée, and Pippa, whom he does love, says they can never be together.

In the movie, Theo’s father (Luke Wilson), in the context of gambling on sports, mentions that being a Scorpio gives him an advantage and then says astrology is very common in the sports betting world: But this isn’t just the movie trying to be trendy with astrology; it’s right there in the book—in fact, the book has Larry’s sun and rising signs: “Sun in Scorpio, Leo Rising,” Tartt wrote. But there’s even more! Namely that we get Theo’s sign, too: Cancer, which his father, naturally, disparages.

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Is Donna Tartt's THE GOLDFINCH a great novel?

Honest question from a person who hasn't read the novel but is interested in doing so in the near future: Is Donna Tartt's The Goldfinch a great novel?

I know it won the Pulitzer Prize. I know it received positive reviews from both critics and reviewers. I know it's hailed in some circles as an heir to the best of Charles Dickens's novels.

But the polarized reception everywhere makes me a bit anxious with regard to reading it.

Some high-Profile literary voices such as James Wood and Francine Prose panned the novel. A lot of readers complain about how they didn't like the book or how it needed a good edit because it was too long. And some comments in r/literature expressed disappointment.

So I have some questions: Is this book really great and worth my time? Did it hold up since it released? And did it deserve the Pulitzer Prize?

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Vinay Prasad's Observations and Thoughts

The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt: A Book Review

Spoiler alert listed below.

This Substack is called Vinay Prasad’s Observations and Thoughts , and, though my attention typically centers on medical topics, today’s post will be under the broader theme of my interests—a book review of Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch . (spoiler alert denoted below).

People close to me will not be surprised to see a book review in these pages. Since I was 10 years old, I have been in love with literature. I read compulsively, obsessively—staying awake till 4 in the morning to finish a novel with school looming the next day, or reading for 14 or 16 hours non-stop on a rainy weekend day or from lift off to touch down on an international flight, till my eyes were bleary.  Donna Tartt’s writing takes me back to my adolescence—being so enamored by a book that it is all consuming.  Under that spell, the pleasure of reading surpasses anything else I could be doing. Well, almost anything.

A few months ago, I read Tartt’s first book The Secret History, and found her to be delightful and lyrical.  That novel--- written in her mid twenties—centers on two crimes committed by a group of Classics students at a small liberal arts school in the northeast. The writing is dazzling. The plot rockets forward.   

Two decades later, Tartt would write the Goldfinch.   I have long believed that in contrast with scientists—who are often most creative and inventive in their 20s and 30s—great fiction writers are at the peak of their craft in their 50s and 60s.  No one exemplifies this more than Philip Roth, whose books of the 1990s-2000s remain one of the most illuminative portraits of life in twenty century America.  To me, The Human Stain is his crowning achievement.

The Goldfinch is a lengthy book—over 750 pages—but when the weight shifted in my hands, and there were just 200 pages between me and the end, I felt sad. I started to read more slowly.  I wanted to make it last, knowing that it would be some time before I find another book as splendid, dazzling and sublime.

The book is a work of art; a tightly wound story that tackles the eternal themes of life:  Love—with careful consideration of its most beautiful and cruelest form: unrequited love; Fathers and sons—how we are shaped in their image even if we do not think or wish so; The death of a parent. Morality and fate—do good things only come from good actions? Or can good come from bad?—Meaning—what is the purpose of life and art in an ephemeral world; Friendships over a lifetime—how we come to love our friends.

Tartt takes on these themes with a plot set in motion with a bomb blast and a borrowed painting.  Her story is intricate, spanning decades in time, geography, a half dozen or more key characters, and yet, it seems so perfect—finishing the book is like snapping the final piece of the puzzle in place.

*spoiler alert, in what follows*

For a moment, I found her choice of the painting itself, Fabritius’ Goldfinch, a cliché. Of course, it had to be a painting by a painter killed in a bomb blast to be borrowed in a bomb blast.  And I don’t use the world stolen because no one who reads the book can believe that is what he did.  But I granted her that illusion, and then, as I finished the book, I realized it could have been no other painting or painter. In many ways, the painting has its own destiny.

Theo’s relationship to his father is portrayed mercilessly.  His father is a drunk, a drug addict, a man who would risk the fortunes of his own son to further his addiction, and Theo hates that.   Then we watch Theo grow up to become a drunk, a drug addict, a man whose forgeries risk the fortunes of Hobie, whom he loves as a father. 

Theo is his father’s son. He inherits the easy with which some men lie—and deceive—how deception becomes a pastime in and of itself—apart from instrumental ends. As Xandra prophecized, Theo is more like his father than he would admit.

Theo starts the book noting how different his life would have been if not for the death of his mother. This is the eternal question for any child who lost his parent at a young age. Then on page 723, Tartt describes Theo’s dreams of his mother. Even in his dreams, he cannot touch her. She is always out of grasp. Until the very moment he needed her guidance most. For those of us who have lost someone close, Tartt captures this painful experience of not being to touch them even in your dreams.

Unrequited love—who hasn’t felt its pain? When he cannot be with Pippa, Theo plays her favorite Arvo Part, and reads novels she had read to gain access to her thoughts— haven’t we all done that?

As is often the case, the object of our desires is someone we don’t truly understand.   Not until the final section does Theo recognize Pippa’s parallel addiction.  Can two people be so similar they aren’t compatible? Their weaknesses feed off each other. Pippa is smart enough to recognize this risk, does he accept her final answer? The reader is left to wonder, perhaps root for them in spite of it all.

Kitsey, the perfect woman. She embodies making the “right” choices in life—the perfect pairing for Theo and she is correct that, in most ways, life with her will be predictable and good.  And yet, the reader feels the spark is missing.  We aren’t left wondering what she thought about his absence over Christmas. We have little sympathy towards her plight— being jilted at your engagement party. 

Yet, most of our own lives are propelled by a series of choices that resemble Kitsey herself—predictable choices, what our parents or sister wants for us.  Tartt leaves us in final limbo on this question, and we can only wonder what Theo will choose.

[On a side note: I have long believed that a great sin in medicine is that path to become a doctor inherently selects for people who make the Kitsey choice every day of their lives, and these folks struggle to understand the many people in the world who would rather be alone, pinning after Pippa. This spills over into all their behavior— including risking challenging accepted dogma or generally being risk taking and courageous.]

The painting, the Goldfinch, becomes a metaphor for the trajectory of all our lives.  It bounces around all over the world, chained to whomever holds it.  Then, in its final act, it serves a purpose larger than itself.  It releases several paintings long lost.  Did Welty envision this journey when he asked Theo to take it?  Did the goldfinch finally break free of the chain that tied it to its nest?  Did Theo get precisely what he wanted? And, more: will the painting one day survive a third bomb blast— the haunting conclusion to the closing paragraph…

“And I add my own love to the history of people who have loved beautiful things, and looked out for them, and pulled them from the fire, and sought them when they were lost, and tried to preserve them and save them while passing them along literally from hand to hand, singing out brilliantly from the wreck of time to the next generation of lovers and the next.”

That is also what I think Tartt’s answer is to the Big — capital B- question. And perhaps the best answer for the meaning of life without God. For the artist— the answer is to create something so beautiful, so transcendent— that people want to pass it along forever, a form of immortality. For the scientist— it is to make a discovery that lasts forever— or changes the arc of humanity. At least, the artist or scientist has to believe this, lest they be sucked in the vortex that leads one to take a mixture of booze and benodiazepines in a hotel in Amsterdam. In Tartt’s particilar case, I think she has succeeded—the book itself is literally her Goldfinch. [As a philosopher, writer and doctor, this is not exactly my answer to the Big question, but I will save that for a longer form]

And, then there are the quotes I flagged, dog-earing the book 50 times, and writing furiously in the margins, let me leave you with a few. Here, what art means to us:

And then this, the very best, on Good and evil. Having witnessed so much in my personal life, and even more in the 18 years I have been in medicine, I know Boris is right.

In our modern world, I cannot help feel pity towards the children (not all of them are young) who constantly try to split the world into black and white, and cancel the ‘bad people.’ They are ignorant to most of the human experience. They have never had to make hard choices where there is no good answer, and not answering is not possible. They have never had to do bad things in order to do great ones. Nor do they recognize that actions they view as virtuous result in tremendous harm. Part of maturity is to learn that “the world is much stranger than we know or can say.”

The Goldfinch was a gorgeous, sumptuous book, displacing my prior favorites Sometimes a Great Notion and El Amor en Los Tiempos Del Colera .  The only consolation in finishing the book in 2023 is knowing that it has been 10 years since Tartt’s last book.  The next one may arrive any day now.  I will be waiting.

PS Donna Tartt if you read this, and are in SF, please drop me a line. 

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The Goldfinch review: A disastrous translation of Donna Tartt’s book to the big screen

The film is handsomely staged and filled with all the extravagant tragedy we’d expect from a film about rich, sad new yorkers, but it’s a pretty tiresome thing to watch, article bookmarked.

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Dir: John Crowley. Starring: Ansel Elgort, Oakes Fegley, Finn Wolfhard, Sarah Paulson, Luke Wilson, Jeffrey Wright, and Nicole Kidman. 15 cert, 149 mins

There’s a morbid curiosity surrounding The Goldfinch ’s disastrous translation to the big screen. It’s a cinematic puzzle box. We poke and prod it, hoping to magically uncover the answer as to why a film with everything in its favour could turn so sour. The film’s an adaptation of a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel written by Donna Tartt . It has a talented director in the form of John Crowley, who already succeeded beautifully in transposing a book to the big screen with 2015’s Brooklyn . Its cast – Nicole Kidman , Sarah Paulson, Finn Wolfhard – has serious clout. It even has the talents of Roger Deakins, the best cinematographer working today. But, after it landed at the Toronto Film Festival with a leaden thud, its measly US opening of $2.6m turned out to be one of the worst in cinematic history.

It’s not an easy to task to pinpoint what exactly about The Goldfinch feels so limp. Certainly you could say it was felled by its own ambitions. At nearly 800 pages long, Tartt’s book is weighty enough to be used as a weapon, allowing its author the luxury of writing both a sprawling odyssey and a lengthy psychological examination of its lead character. Theo – played by Oakes Fegley as a child, Ansel Elgort as an adult – is a survivor of the terrorist bombing at the Met that killed his mother. From the rubble, he salvages her favourite painting, Carel Fabritius’s The Goldfinch (a real work created in 1654, currently housed in The Hague). It becomes a tortured kind of talisman for Theo, as he carries it with him through the various misfortunes of his life.

25 books that should have never been made into films

At first, he finds a home with the impeccably wealthy Barbours and their cold-eyed matriarch, Samantha (Kidman). He makes friends with Hobie (Wright), an antique dealer and the guardian of the young girl (Aimee Laurence) he connected with moments before the blast. Out of the blue, Theo’s absentee father (Luke Wilson) and equally shady girlfriend Xandra (Paulson) rock up, demanding he come live with them in the outskirts of Vegas, in a housing development that’s slowly being reclaimed by the desert.

The film eventually circles back to its opening scene, where an adult Theo contemplates suicide in an Amsterdam hotel. But there’s no mystery to how the film reaches that point, since it actually turns out to be part of a bizarre epilogue that veers into pure thriller territory. The Goldfinch holds you captive while it fumbles around, desperately trying to make you believe in it. It fades in and out between past and present, with images blurring into each other (thanks to Deakins they are, at least, beautiful images). The effect is supposed to be that of some horrid dream, but the result feels more like a drunken haze.

Peter Straughan’s screenplay is simply too timid to take a pair of shears to Tartt’s original work. More crucially, it seems unable to excavate the real heart of the story. The hope is that a series of pretty symbols will do the trick instead and it’ll all somehow come together. We repeatedly see The Goldfinch lying unblemished in the art museum rubble. The air is thick with dust and there’s a disquieting stillness. As Theo walks through the aftermath of the explosion, it’s depicted like a Greek hero’s journey through the Underworld, as ghosts call out to him with prophetic messages.

But it’s all poeticism without a sense of humanity, since the characters themselves aren’t written as people, but as broad statements. Kidman’s Samantha can only express emotion through significant glances, while her son’s entire character is an angry jock caricature: he sits down for breakfast, screams “who do I have to blow to get a cup of coffee around this place?”, and then bangs his fists on the table. Then there’s Wolfhard’s Boris, a Russian-accented latchkey kid who’s styled in post-punk cosplay and can’t be onscreen for more than five minutes without offering someone vodka. The Goldfinch is handsomely staged and filled with all the extravagant tragedy we’d expect from a film about rich, sad New Yorkers, but it’s far too wrapped up in the search for its own meaning. And that’s a pretty tiresome thing to watch.

The Goldfinch is released in UK cinemas on 27 September

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The Goldfinch shows the perils of being too faithful to the book

A lackluster adaptation of the Pulitzer-winning novel is unlikely to please even the book’s biggest fans.

by Alissa Wilkinson

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a book’s fans will complain about the movie version , and that’s fine. But more literary adaptations are wrecked by slavish source fidelity than by imaginative tweaks. Movies and books are different media, and they have to tell stories in different ways. As long as the original’s soul is preserved, everyone wins.

Which goes a long way toward explaining why The Goldfinch doesn’t work on screen, or at least not in John Crowley’s adaptation. Donna Tartt’s Pulitzer-winning 2013 novel, a doorstop at nearly 800 pages, meanders (somewhat tediously, for my taste) through the youth and early adulthood of a boy named Theo. Along the journey, it contemplates philosophical matters, like the effects of trauma or blind chance on our life paths, or the possibility of authentic art. It is not an obvious fit for a feature-length film.

The problem lies largely in the screenplay. The Goldfinch was adapted by Peter Straughan, who’s written serious-minded adaptations before, like 2011’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy , but also the truly atrocious 2017 The Snowman . I’m not much of a fan of Tartt’s novel, which repeats some of the self-seriousness of her 1992 murder mystery The Secret History (a book I love), but that feature becomes far less enjoyable at the much greater length.

But I think I’d rather re-read The Goldfinch than watch it again. Straughan’s screenplay strips out most of the novel’s heart in favor of plot fidelity, albeit with the pieces told out of order. No longer does it feel like we’re on a journey with Theo. Instead, we’re just observing what happened to him during his life, and there’s no reason to care about any of it.

The Goldfinch wastes most of what was great about the novel, and thus misses the point

Theo (played as a boy by Oakes Fegley and a young man by Ansel Elgort) loses his mother in a terrorist bombing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and winds up adrift for years, shuttled from a friend’s family to his conniving father’s home in Las Vegas to a life in antique dealing back in New York. Along the way, Theo pines for a girl named Pippa, makes friends with a worldly wise kid named Boris, becomes engaged, sells some antique fakes, and keeps toting around a small 17th century Dutch painting of a goldfinch that he grabbed from the museum in the confusion following the explosion.

Unlike the novel, which unfolds chronologically, the film weaves around in circles without spending too much time anywhere in particular. Thus it mostly wastes its impressive cast, which includes Nicole Kidman, Luke Wilson, Sarah Paulson, and Finn Wolfhard. Only Jeffrey Wright, who plays the antique restorer (and Theo’s guardian angel in the flesh) Hobie, seems to have space to do what he needs in the role — by turns vulnerable and stern and wise and wounded.

Crowley, who made the wonderful 2015 drama Brooklyn , knows how to paint lush domestic spaces, some of which show up here — Hobie’s home and workshop, nestled into the ground level of a brownstone, is the kind of place to which you want to escape permanently. But he’s working with a screenplay that doesn’t give anyone space to breathe, and crowds out space for the philosophical reflection that knit together the book’s seemingly disparate strands.

Because The Goldfinch , at its best, is a story about how seemingly random events direct our lives, and how a momentous, traumatic event can extend long fingers into our futures, even when we think we’ve moved on. (It remains strange to me that the terrorist attack that is the inciting incident of The Goldfinch essentially disappears from the book without having any repercussions beyond its effects on Theo, but the movie is faithful to this as well.)

Yet the true chaos of Theo’s life, the chance encounters and last-minute decisions that determine his life’s direction, play like actual chaos at the novel’s length. Even at a hefty two-and-a-half hours, the film makes these experiences seem contrived. Theo acknowledges his own passivity; he refers to his own life as having a “before” and an “after” the incident, and that stealing the painting is “the one thing [I] did.” Everything else only happens to him: his capers with Boris, his experiences with his father, even his own engagement. But that doesn’t make for a great story.

There’s still the kernel of a great idea here, contained in a scene from before the explosion, in which Theo’s mother explains to him that Dutch paintings are highly detailed, and “even the tiniest thing matters” in them. She refers to painters who leave “secret messages” for the viewer in seemingly simple, even banal paintings — an element left on a table, an item on the wall. A clock can remind you, she said, that things don’t last.

Tartt’s novel comes in at such great length because it’s trying, for better or worse, to emulate that artistic technique. It’s filled with rich, detailed descriptions of the items that fill Theo’s world, all reminders of the importance that mere objects — like, say, an antique table, or a simple painting of a bird — can have in a person’s life. In the film, those are glanced over before we’ve got to move on to the next thing. And in sticking so closely to the plot of the novel, The Goldfinch loses the story, and the soul, of its source.

The Goldfinch premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival and opens in theaters on September 13.

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The Life Impossible by Matt Haig review – a journey of rediscovery

A woman acquires supernatural abilities on Ibiza in this follow-up to The Midnight Library

“I am not special,” says Grace Winters, the narrator of Matt Haig ’s follow-up to his bestseller The Midnight Library . “I am a crotchety old Brit. I am a retired maths teacher from the middle of nowhere. I am a big nothing, is who I am.” But as you might suspect if you’re familiar with Haig’s habit of conjuring the extraordinary out of the ordinary, Grace is far from being a big nothing. When she unexpectedly finds herself on the island of Ibiza, she realises just how much of a something she really is.

A small, long-ago act of kindness towards her colleague Christina leads to Grace being bequeathed a house in the Balearics in Christina’s will. Puzzled as to why a virtual stranger would do such a thing, Grace, recently widowed and still carrying guilt from the childhood death of her son, decides to visit Ibiza to find out, and to investigate Christina’s drowning there. It will be a distraction from her own problems, because “joint pain is like grief, the more you think about it, the more it hurts”.

Arriving at a dilapidated house, armed only with a letter from Christina, Grace eventually finds her way to Alberto Ribas, a raucous diving instructor and a man she has been told by the locals to avoid. On a midnight boat trip with Alberto, where he promises to reveal what happened the night Christina died, Grace witnesses a mysterious light beneath the ocean – La Pre sen cia . This encounter bestows upon her the ability not only to read minds and move objects at will, but also to experience life at its very fullest. Armed with these new skills, Grace sets out to solve the mystery of Christina’s death, a journey that takes her through the island’s ecosystem and leads to the money-hungry developers who threaten to destroy everything.

If The Life Impossible was given a label, it would almost certainly be  magic realism , one of those oxymorons (along with “cosy crime”) of which we’re terribly fond. Haig asks that you suspend disbelief, that you accept the powers of La Presencia and the gifts it gives to Grace, and his writing is so persuasive that you do so without question, because reading a Matt Haig novel is like discovering a secret staircase in your home. A whole new set of rooms to explore, and suddenly the layout of the rest of the house makes so much more sense.

On the surface, The Life Impossible is a story of contrasts. Grace travels from her bleak bungalow in Lincoln to solve a crime on the most vibrant island in the world. As her unlikely friendship with Alberto progresses, her mathematical mind embraces the improbable, and she is released from anhedonia – going from feeling nothing at all to feeling everything . Possibly my favourite scene is when Grace, now able to sense the distress of the lobsters in a restaurant tank, smashes the glass with her mind and an army of delighted crustaceans runs past baffled diners and back into the ocean. If you’re going to try out newly acquired telekinesis, that’s a great call.

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As the story unfolds, and the circumstances of Christina’s death begin to threaten the island itself, the lines between those contrasts become less defined. Science blends into art and maths dissolves into the natural world. The many seemingly unrelated references Haig scatters across the pages, from Nostradamus to Freddie Mercury, Shakespeare to Hill Street Blues, all begin to weave together, and the only way Grace will save herself – and the island – is to embrace those connections. “It is vast and magnificent, this sequence,” explains Alberto as he and Grace watch the sun set over the island. “It connects you to every single thing in this universe.”

Haig’s wise and moving novel is both a mystery and a love story, a fantasy and a billet-doux to the planet. Perhaps its greatest gift lies in showing us that it is possible to dismantle the boundaries we have built, grasp the connections previously hidden, and appreciate life in all its richness. And the realisation that magic realism probably isn’t an oxymoron after all.

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Review: ‘the goldfinch’ is a fine example of the kind of movie hollywood (allegedly) doesn’t make anymore.

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Ansel Elgort and Nicole Kidman in 'The Goldfinch'

I talk a lot about what I call "movie-movies." These are old-school one-and-done studio movies. Some are immersed explicitly in genre and some are explicitly in the realm of comedy or drama. They are not intended to create or continue a franchise, strengthen a brand or hold up the tent. It's no secret that audiences have drifted away from this kind of thing, at least at the theatrical level. VOD and streaming entertainment options have replaced theatrical moviegoing as the go-to entertainment option in terms of cost and convenience. Director John Crowley and screenwriter Peter Straughan's  The Goldfinch , financed both by Warner Bros. and Amazon (in exchange for streaming rights), is as much of a "movie-movie" as you're likely to find in 2019.

Official studio synopsis: Theodore “Theo” Decker was 13 years old when his mother was killed in a bombing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The tragedy changes the course of his life, sending him on a stirring odyssey of grief and guilt, reinvention and redemption, and even love. Through it all, he holds on to one tangible piece of hope from that terrible day...a painting of a tiny bird chained to its perch. The Goldfinch.

The Goldfinch is a sprawling, decades-spanning epic rooted in character and visual beauty, based on Donna Tartt's best-selling novel and daring to exist in a time of event movies and franchise fare. Produced by Nina Jacobson and Brad Simpson, it wears its designation as a "drama" like a badge of honor. It is a character study, about a young man whose mother dies by sudden violence and how he copes with that loss as well as the other curves his life throws at him as he matures into a (still-tormented) young man. The film is stacked to the gills with fine actors, with Nicole Kidman, Jeffrey Wright, Denis O'Hare (in a two-scene cameo seemingly cosplaying as Henry Czerny's Kittridge from the first  Mission: Impossible ) and Sarah Paulson offering sturdy support to the younger stars.

Finn Wolfhard and Oakes Fegley in 'The Goldfinch'

Ansel Elgort is the top-billed star, but the real lead is a dynamite Oakes Fegley (star of the also-terrific Pete ’s Dragon ) as our young protagonist. If anything, the film falters in its third act when Elgort's now-adult Theo takes center stage. That is not because of the  Baby Driver / Fault in Our Stars  actor, but instead because the character study tries to stuff an entire film's worth of plot and present-tense narrative into its final few reels. The first 90 minutes is where the film shines brightest, focusing on interaction, relationships and mundane life details. Finn Wolfhard is terrific in the film's second act, as a young Ukrainian emigre who becomes Theo's close friend during a time of loneliness and despair. He (and O'Hare) are the liveliest characters in this otherwise muted odyssey.

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I can't speak to source fidelity or how well it captures whatever fans most appreciated about the 773-page novel. And nor will I argue that it's anywhere near as impressive as Crowley's previous period-piece literary adaptation, the modern classic  Brooklyn . But this is a John Crowley movie featuring gorgeously intimate cinematography courtesy of Roger Deakins. Seeing it last night on a massive screen at The Grove, it was hard not to be lost in its beauty and its specificity. Not unlike Quentin Tarantino's  Once Upon A Time... in Hollywood ,  The Goldfinch  is a lazy river of a movie, one that invites you to lose yourself in its world and its specific pleasures as it slowly tells its story at its own pace.

Ansel Elgort and Jeffrey Wright in 'The Goldfinch'

If we want more movies like  The Goldfinch  or  The Kitchen , we may have to be willing to note that they aren't going to be as tight-rope exciting as a big-budget action thriller or as fan-friendly as a superhero flick. We are going to have to forgive the lack of Easter eggs, sequel teases or the inherently interesting variable that is a big movie star playing a pop culture icon. Moreover, if we want more non-branded films, we can't automatically snark-to-death any film whose trailer looks unique or odd. A movie like  The Goldfinch  is "just a movie," a well-acted, handsomely-staged, ambitiously-produced and refreshingly grown-up film in an era when merely being a singular feature-length story is perhaps the most significant commercial handicap a film can have.

If this all sounds like halfhearted praise, well, it is.  The Goldfinch  is no modern masterpiece, and it's probably not going to end up in the Oscar race. It has pacing issues and ends up saving most of its plot/incident for the third act. But it is the kind of thing we all claim we want, from a major studio no less, alongside the conventional would-be blockbusters. I will argue that it is a three-star movie that shouldn't be unduly penalized because it's not a four-star movie or because it prioritizes character over onscreen incident. It's almost certainly doomed commercially, but unless we only want dramas when they come caked in clown make-up,  The Goldfinch  is worth your time and money.

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Nate Silver Gives Us Good Odds for a Bad Future

In “On the Edge,” the election forecaster argues that the gambler’s mind-set has come to define modern life.

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ON THE EDGE: The Art of Risking Everything , by Nate Silver

A common trope in dystopian fiction — “ The Hunger Games ,” “ Chain-Gang All-Stars ” — is the wealthy society that devotes itself to ever more exotic and expansive forms of gambling. Nate Silver, best known as a statistician and election modeler, makes the case that we are at least partway there.

We haven’t quite started taking bets on the survivors of a televised battle royale, but in his engaging and entertaining new book, “On the Edge,” Silver describes how the decision-making methods of the professional gambler have spread to encompass a wide swath of human activities, from cryptocurrency investment to the pursuit of a more ethical life. He offers readers an interview-driven tour of the parts of America where the outlooks and incomes depend on sophisticated forms of risk-taking. The result is a glimpse of the economy of the future.

Not all of these human calculators are the same. Silver and his subjects live along what he calls “the River.” Upstream are the economists and philosophers who do math and solve logic puzzles for lofty reasons like maximizing happiness. Float on a little ways and you will spot the Wall Street traders and stockbrokers. Keep going all the way down to the place where the River meets the shore and you’ll find yourself bobbing among the small-time crypto investors and card sharks. Now you’re really at sea.

No matter their vocation or chosen hobbies, citizens of the River are united in their point of view; to them, everything is a probability, a question of “expected value.” River people look everywhere for an “edge” — an insight into something hard to predict that will give them a profitable betting strategy over the long term. Might the markets be systematically underestimating the New York Mets or Robert F. Kennedy Jr.? Pick the right pony, and there could be a reliable path to wealth and glory.

“When I began working on this book, I knew I’d have conversations with poker players, venture capitalists and cryptocurrency enthusiasts,” Silver writes. “I didn’t think I’d spend a lot of time talking with philosophers.” But Silver found that a lot of the philosophers — and many of the artificial intelligence coders — he spoke to were associated with an intellectual movement related to gambling: effective altruism.

Like a gambler or an investment banker (or the 18th-century utilitarian Jeremy Bentham), effective altruists are focused on ethical calculations based on outcomes. If you’re comfortable allowing one man to die to save five or if you like worrying about whether we’re grossly underinvested in protecting Earth from asteroid collisions (low odds, but an enormous loss in value), you’re probably in the tribe. “Many poker players and many people in finance” don’t care about other people, the Oxford philosopher and leading light of effective altruism Will MacAskill tells Silver. “But some do.”

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