The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt - An Excellent Book

I have just finished reading The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt. It has a massive 864 pages and is one of the longest books I’ve read apart from Dickens’ novels. Even several of Dickens’ novels don’t have as many as 800+ pages.

Maybe Donna Tartt went on a little too long. Because she doesn’t write many novels, maybe she thinks that when she does write, she should produce many pages. No matter, she writes brilliantly. It isn’t just me saying so - Donna Tartt won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2013 for The Goldfinch.  

The beginning of this book is heartbreaking and describes the profound loss and grief that a child feels on losing a parent. The boy in this book loses his mother in an explosion in an art gallery in New York. There is no good age to lose a parent but it seems to me that 12 is one of the worst ages. At age 12, a child is just coming up to adolescence, a difficult and confusing time. The adult world is on the cusp of opening up. To have someone who has loved you, and has known you since birth, is every child’s birthright. To have that person no longer with you must be very difficult to deal with. I very much hope that the love given before the death, can be drawn upon. Maybe that is just a fantasy.

When he was 16, my son had a girlfriend of the same age. The girl’s mum had died of epilepsy, when the girl was 9 years old. Her brother was 12 at the time. They barely spoke of their mum. I don’t think they had the words. I think about them even now, 8 years later, and not only do I feel compassion for the brother and sister, I also feel so sad for the mother who died and had to leave her children – thereby missing out on their lives, not being there to share the joys and difficulties life throws at us all.

The boy, Theo, in The Goldfinch, goes to stay with his friend’s family, but it is no substitute at all for the life he lived with his mum.   And the story continues. It is beautifully written. The characterization is superb, the descriptions evocative and the emotions so credibly conveyed.

After the explosion, the boy goes back to his apartment, certain that his mum will be there waiting for him. As he waits for her, he talks of how, when he was younger, his ‘greatest fear was that some day my mother might not come home from work.’ This is a fear that I can very well relate to. I had exactly the same fear. I can remember watching for my mum out of the window and dreading the light fading and it going dark. I believed that some disaster might befall her out there in the dark, without me to look after her. That comment might appear ridiculous, as I was 8 years old and would be pretty useless against a determined assailant. But that is how I felt and I can still feel that anxiety now, the strength of it, the choking sense of something having happened to my mum because I wasn’t by her side. Decades on from worrying about my mum, who is now 92 years old, I can still feel that sense of dread but now it is directed at those who are motherless and to the dead mothers who missed out on their children’s lives. That is a particularly cruel tragedy. So it’s no wonder then, that when my youngest child reached 21, I did a dance of joy and relief.