Donna Tartt’s “The Goldfinch.”
Tartt has a considerable talent for magical misdirection.
Tartt has a considerable talent for magical misdirection.Illustration by Stéphane Manel

Like the rest of us, Donna Tartt ages; but her fiction is going the other way. Her new novel, “The Goldfinch” (Little, Brown), is a virtual baby: it clutches and releases the most fantastical toys. Its tone, language, and story belong to children’s literature. Consider the following two passages. In the first, a thirteen-year-old boy makes his way to a dusty antique shop in a big city. His mother has died in an awful explosion at a museum, and, because his alcoholic father is long estranged, the boy has become a near-orphan. During the confused aftermath of the explosion, an old man, fatally wounded, hands the boy a heavy gold ring, and entrusts him with a priceless seventeenth-century painting. The dying man tells the boy to go to “Hobart and Blackwell. . . . Ring the green bell.” These clues—and the ring!—eventually lead the boy to the premises of Hobart and Blackwell, where the door is answered by a charming man named James Hobart, or Hobie, for short:

I was on a slightly shabby part of the street that was mainly residential. . . . Many of the numbers weren’t clearly posted, and just as I was wondering if I’d missed it and ought to double back, I suddenly found myself looking at the words Hobart and Blackwell painted in a neat, old-fashioned arch upon the window of a shop. Through the dusty windows I saw Staffordshire dogs and majolica cats, dusty crystal, tarnished silver, antique chairs and settees upholstered in sallow old brocade, an elaborate faience birdcage, miniature marble obelisks atop a marble-topped pedestal table and a pair of alabaster cockatoos. It was just the kind of shop my mother would have liked—packed tightly, a bit dilapidated, with stacks of old books on the floor. . . . Then—so suddenly I started back—the door opened, and I found myself gazing up at a large and unexpected person.

He was six foot four or six five, at least; haggard, noble-jawed, heavy. . . . Over his clothes, a rich paisley robe with satin lapels fell almost to his ankles and flowed massively around him, like something a leading man might wear in a 1930s movie: worn, but still impressive.

In the second passage, a boy who is roughly the same age as the narrator of the first excerpt arrives at an impressive building, with a brass nameplate, in the middle of London. This boy has five siblings. The children have no mother, and their father is impecunious, so they have embarked on a series of adventurous money-making schemes: they have tried to be detectives, and bandits, and writers, and now have decided that a certain Mr. Rosenbaum, who lends money, will be their “G.B.,” or Generous Benefactor:

“Mr Rosenbaum will see you,” so we wiped our feet on the mat, which said so, and we went up stairs with soft carpets and into a room. It was a beautiful room. . . . The room had velvet curtains and a soft, soft carpet, and it was full of the most splendid things. Black and gold cabinets, and china, and statues, and pictures. There was a picture of a cabbage and a pheasant and a dead hare that was just like life, and I would have given worlds to have it for my own. . . . Then besides the pictures there were clocks and candlesticks and vases, and gilt looking-glasses, and boxes of cigars and scent and things littered all over the chairs and tables. It was a wonderful place, and in the middle of all the splendour was a little old gentleman with a very long black coat and a very long white beard and a hookey nose—like a falcon.

The first passage is from “The Goldfinch,” the second from E. Nesbit’s marvellous book for children, “The Story of the Treasure Seekers,” published in 1899. Nesbit’s writing, with its lumps and ingenuous repetitions, sounds like a child talking to us, whereas Tartt’s smoother, more literary voice resembles adult pastiche. But both scenes imply a kind of proscenium arch: the pleasure of theatrical discovery merges with the pleasure of the narrative, and the reader sees with the eyes of the enchanted narrator. Tartt repeatedly stages such gothic encounters. Early in her first novel, “The Secret History” (1992), the narrator makes his way to the door of the glamorous and sinister classicist who holds sway over a twisted little élite at the fictional Hampden College:

Once at the top I found myself in a long, deserted hallway. Enjoying the noise of my shoes on the linoleum, I walked along briskly, looking at the closed doors for numbers or names until I came to one that had a brass card holder and, within it, an engraved card that read julian morrow. I stood there for a moment and then I knocked, three short raps.

A minute or so passed, and another, and then the white door opened just a crack. A face looked out at me.

The point is not the disclosure of a meaningful reality but the management of continuous artifice, a proffered tray of delicious narrative revelations. Hampden College is less like Bennington (Tartt’s alma mater) than like something out of Poe. As the happy ending of “The Treasure Seekers” smiles on us, Nesbit’s narrator comments, “Besides, I can’t help it if it is like Dickens, because it happens this way. Real life is often something like books.” Or, rather, fictional life is often something like fictional life in other books: Nesbit’s Victorian London seems little different from Tartt’s contemporary Manhattan.

Sure enough, at Hobart and Blackwell (we are told that it is somewhere on West Tenth Street), Hobie, a furniture restorer, turns out to be a reassuring, fatherly character from children’s fiction. Though the narrator tells us that “his voice was rough but educated, like Mr. O’Shea my History teacher who’d grown up in a tough Boston neighborhood and ended up going to Harvard,” Hobie—who appears to be from New York State—sounds consistently non-American: “Ah sorry . . . I’ve set up camp in here as you can see, not the best arrangement in the world but I’ve had to make do since I can’t hear properly with all the goings-on.” (Michael Gambon’s voice should do nicely.) The American setting is not as important as the Anglicized suspension in which the fairy tale floats: throughout this seven-hundred-and-seventy-page yarn, Tartt’s American characters move through a world of cozy Britishisms, like “they tucked into their food,” “you look knackered,” “crikey,” “skive off,” and “gobsmacked.” Indeed, Hobie’s house—rather like Tartt’s novel—is a place, the narrator thinks, “where without even realizing it you slipped away sometimes into 1850, a world of ticking clocks and creaking floorboards, copper pots and baskets of turnips and onions in the kitchen.”

To be fair, Tartt has considerable talents in the field of magical misdirection. Few readers who started “The Secret History” did not feel the need to finish it. Her books can return you to several of the primal and innocent delights of childish reading. But misdirection is practiced evasion, and narrative secrets are tested by the value of their revelations: we will need, as bounty, more than the prestidigitator’s ace of spades.

The bounty, literal and figurative, at the center of all the absurd legerdemain of “The Goldfinch” is the painting of the same name, by the great seventeenth-century Dutch artist Carel Fabritius, a student of Rembrandt. It is a serene study of habituated imprisonment: a finch, one of its feet attached by a ring and a short chain to the little box it is perched on. This gemlike masterwork powers Tartt’s narrative: it is seen and cherished at the Metropolitan Museum by a boy and his mother, stolen by the boy, hidden, stolen again by someone else, and finally recovered. It occasions some of the deeper writing in the book, as Tartt slows from her adventurous storytelling to the eventless calm of ekphrasis, and describes the mournful splendor of Fabritius’s own painterly patience. But, alas, it is surrounded by prolix scrawls of novelistic impatience, and eventually the noisy tension between the two works, Fabritius’s and Tartt’s, becomes acute. “The Goldfinch” (1654) and “The Goldfinch” (2013) are birds of a very different feather. 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” may not survive the way the 1654 “Goldfinch” has.

Tartt’s novel bursts into its busy life when, near the start, a terrorist bomb devastates part of the Metropolitan Museum. The thirteen-year-old Theo Decker (he is supposedly narrating the story fourteen years later) has been examining Fabritius’s painting with his mother, a keen if unfulfilled student of the Dutch masters. Theo is more interested in a couple who have come to look at the same painting: an old man and an intriguingly inaccessible girl (“beautiful skin: milky white, arms like carved marble”). Disoriented and traumatized by the blast, he comes across the old man, dying on the floor of the museum. Theo comforts him, takes his hand, while the old man babbles apparent nonsense (“Tell Hobie to get out of the store,” and so on). Somehow, the Fabritius painting is lying near the man, and he urges Theo to take it.

Theo escapes from the burning museum with the invaluable object in his possession, and is thus inducted into a life of criminal secrecy that propels the book’s writhing narrative. Eventually, Theo moves from New York to Las Vegas, to live with his father, a gambler and small-time swindler, and later moves back to New York, where he starts working for Hobie. Through hundreds of pages, Theo chases his dream of one art work and two people: “The Goldfinch,” his dead mother, and the girl he saw at the Met. The old man’s clues lead Theo to Hobie’s shop, where the girl, Pippa, is recovering from the bomb blast. Hobie becomes a kind of Magwitch for Theo—Magwitch without the criminal record—and Pippa becomes his desired and forbidden Estella. These fantasies have a Nesbittian sweetness, and certainly Tartt’s plot is unembarrassed by its loot of Dickensian accident, coincidence, suspense, and reversal. One understands that the painting is important for Theo: it is a stable and rare object in a world of flux, it reminds him of his mother (who loved it), and it was painted by a man who was himself killed in an explosion, in Delft. And the longer Theo holds on to it the more perilous it is to return. But the novel’s frantic inability to provide a credible account for the old man’s larcenous devotion, and its unwillingness to explain why Theo so easily falls into the same larceny—walking out of the Met with a priceless object stuffed into a bag—seem a species of magical thinking, a setup that merely enables a sentimental nexus (girl, painting, dead mother, Generous Benefactor) and a good deal of melodramatic plotting.This plotting breeds, or is bred by, wildly uneven sentences. The worked sheen and consistent density of “The Secret History” and Tartt’s second novel, “The Little Friend” (2002), have here surrendered to patched anarchy. There is too much straightforward genre stuffing: “I had just about convinced myself . . . when a deafening buzz (the doorbell) shattered the silence and my heart leaped up for joy.” Or: “My heart was pounding and my head swam.” The borrowed emotion of the plot often finds exact form in easy, familiar gestures. There are rhetorical questions: “Would I ever see either of them again?” Or: “How was it possible to miss someone as much as I missed my mother?” And: “Had anyone ever felt so lonely?” Tartt has a tendency—always a telling moment in contemporary fiction—to liken her characters or scenes to cinematic analogues, as if to work off a debt. Theo’s father seems “almost as if he was playing a character: some cool guy from a fifties noir or maybe Ocean’s Eleven.” Scared as he tries to smuggle his stolen painting through an airport, Theo imagines “some cinder-block room like in the movies, slammed doors, angry cops in shirtsleeves, forget about it, you’re not going anywhere, kid.” More bewilderingly, from a novelist known for her control, there is overwriting and excitable flailing. At one moment, in Las Vegas, Theo is almost drowned in a pool by a thuggish friend, Boris, who is drunk and larking around—a serious event, but surely not one that merits such flailing imprecision on the writer’s part:

I thrashed and twisted, as glubs of panicked breath floated before my eyes: underwater bells, darkness. At last—just as I was about to gulp in a lungful of water—I twisted free and broke to the surface.

Choking for breath, I clung to the edge of the pool and gasped. When my vision cleared, I saw Boris—coughing, cursing—plunging towards the steps. Breathless with anger, I half-swam, half hopped up behind him, and hooked a foot around his ankle so that he fell face-forward with a smack.

“Asshole,” I sputtered, when he floundered to the surface.Through all this thrashing, twisting, gulping, choking, gasping, coughing, cursing, plunging, sputtering, and floundering, I kept on trying to imagine a different novel, stripped of its unreasonable raison d’être and its childish sweets, a more rigorous fiction entitled, perhaps, not “The Goldfinch” but just “Theo Decker.” A novel with no stolen painting, no inexplicable theft and unlikely explosion, no shoot-outs, no sudden deaths and fatal abandonments, and fewer Dickensian or Nesbittian shops. Instead, there might have been the affecting story of, say, a thirteen-year-old boy, the victim of divorce, sent West from New York to the alien aridity of Las Vegas, forced to live with his unsuitable father. It was hard to imagine as the pages went by, but not impossible, because Las Vegas provokes the best sustained writing in this novel. When Theo’s father watches football on television, and the afternoon light begins to thin, and Tartt tenderly and evocatively paints this slight desolation of Sunday afternoons in the desert, does she have any idea of the very different writer she might still choose to become?
On game day, until five o’clock or so, the white desert light held off the essential Sunday gloom—autumn sinking into winter, loneliness of October dusk with school the next day—but there was always a long still moment toward the end of those football afternoons where the mood of the crowd turned and everything grew desolate and uncertain, onscreen and off, the sheet-metal glare off the patio glass fading to gold and then gray, long shadows and night falling into desert stillness, a sadness I couldn’t shake off, a sense of silent people filing toward the stadium exits and cold rain falling in college towns back east. ♦