What Scots are Reading: The Goldfinch

We asked a fellow Monmouth College Scot to tell us about a recent book they enjoyed. The result is what we hope will be a regular series, "What Scots are Reading."  If you would like to contribute a book review, drop us a note: reference@monmouthcollege.edu.

Review of Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch

By Barry McNamara, Associate Director of College Communications

 

Some of my first experiences with reviews came while watching American Bandstand. A new song would be played, and the youngster that Dick Clark interviewed for their fresh take would inevitably say something like, “It had a good beat. I could dance to it. I give it a 98.”

I’m going to try to be a little more original with my first book review for Hewes Library – on Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch – but there’s also a very similar, short and sweet, Bandstand-esque way of communicating my thoughts about it: It won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. You should probably check it out.

When I sat down to start reading The Goldfinch, that’s all I knew about it and, in keeping with that limited prior knowledge, I won’t reveal much about the plot in this review. But it’s not too big of a spoiler alert to say that the title comes from the famous 1654 painting by Dutch artist Carel Fabritius.

I did know one other thing about the book, which I learned upon receiving it from the helpful staff member at Hewes Library who’d gone upstairs to retrieve it – it’s L-O-N-G. Not long as in tedious, by any means. But it’s a hefty 771 pages, and one is not likely to breeze through it in a weekend, unless one has been trapped inside by the latest round of snow and/or freezing cold to hit western Illinois.

But that length figures into the main thing I want readers to know about The Goldfinch. I made steady progress through it, and I found myself on the weekend before it was due back at Hewes with pages 699-771 to read. I read them in one sitting, and my fresh take on it is this: if Tartt wrote most of those pages in a relatively short amount of time, it has to go down as one of the great “hot streaks” by an author in modern times.

In those final 72 pages, she revealed so many deep truths and produced so many emotional goosebumps for me that I vowed to transcribe some of them before I returned the book. In the process of doing so, I stumbled across a website that boasted the 25 top quotations from The Goldfinch. Fifteen of those 25 excerpts came from those final 72 pages.

(Here’s one that didn’t make the cut – but I enjoyed it just the same – from page 724: “So – maybe when Andy washed up spitting and coughing into the country on the far side of the water, maybe my mother was the very one who knelt down by his side to greet him on the foreign shore. Maybe it’s stupid to even articulate such hopes. But then again, maybe it’s more stupid not to.”)

So, should the reader just flip ahead to page 699 and start from there? Of course not! I’m a sports guy, and doing so would be like a Chicago Cubs fan only watching the last out of Game 7 of the 2016 World Series. The entire game was an all-time classic – the highs and lows, the doubts and ecstasy.

So read the first 699 pages of The Goldfinch. Ride the highs and lows with Theo Decker.

But also read them for all the “Psst, you. Hey kid. Yes you” moments in the book – the moments when Tartt seems to be speaking directly to you about some very personal aspect of your life. The parts where, as it says in the book, “It’ll never strike anybody in the same way.”

And then savor pages 699-771. Those pages are like the finale to a fireworks show on the Fourth of July – what leads up to them are a steady barrage of singular colorful explosions in the sky, some of them lingering in your mind long after you’ve seen them (like the weeping willow tree one always does for me). And then the rapid-fire flurry at the ending – almost more colors and light and sound than you can process at one time. Sensory overload.

That’s what the ending of the book was like for me, and I hope it strikes you that way, too. Overall, I’ll give The Goldfinch two points more than a 98 and, of course, five tartan stars.

The Goldfinch is available for checkout from Hewes Library: PS3570.A657 G65 2013