On Oct. 12, 1654, the munitions factory in Delft exploded. More than a quarter of the city was destroyed and there were countless victims, among them the painter Fabritius—Rembrandt’s student, Vermeer’s teacher—and all but a few of his paintings. One of the few that survived is “The Goldfinch,” a 13-by-9 inch painting of the eponymous bird, chained by its ankle to a perch.
The same bird gives its name to Donna Tartt’s latest novel, The Goldfinch. Tartt is known for her two hefty tomes, The Little Friend and The Secret History, published 10 years apart. They are all epic-like in scale and scope, but The Goldfinch focuses on a boy—Theo Decker—who has lost his mother in a terrorist attack. In a storyline reminiscent of Oliver Twist, we follow Theo’s trials and travails around the United States with the titular painting in tow.
The Goldfinch has been called Dickensian as many times as it has pages—almost 800. But while Charles Dickens is a universally recognized great, known for his works addressing social inequalities and his caricatures of good and evil, The Goldfinch does not moralize.
It is concerned instead with the beauty to be found in an inevitably rough, dirty life—the way a grimy window can be beautiful when a shard of sunlight pierces through. In fact, light plays an important role: the pure yellow light of the “Goldfinch” painting itself, the crass light of the neon signs on the Vegas strip, the dim glow of a first-floor Park Avenue apartment shadowed by skyscrapers and overhangs, its windows shuttered by the overhanging stone and massive striving that constitutes NYC. With chiaroscuro creativity, Tartt’s images are so sensually strong that she is painterly, herself.
This is well demonstrated here:
“Sometimes, in the evenings, a damp, gritty wind blew in the windows from Park Avenue, just as the rush hour traffic was thinning and the city was emptying for the night; it was rainy, trees leafing out, spring deepening into summer; and the forlorn cry of horns on the street, the dank smell of wet pavement had an electricity about it, a sense of crowds and static, lonely secretaries and fat guys with bags of carry out, everywhere the ungainly sadness of creatures pushing and struggling to live.”
But amid the struggle, Tartt’s characters grasp at beauty. Hobie, an antique furniture restorer, is the prime example. He describes with great eloquence the power that art can have to lift people up, and he demonstrates this in his kindness and empathy—Hobie takes Theo in after he is essentially orphaned and they have known each other for only scant few weeks. Theo works with Hobie in his studio imbibing his wisdom and trade.
In one of their workroom talks, Hobie says of Fabritius’ “Goldfinch,” “You see one painting, I see another, the art book puts it at another remove still, the lady buying the greeting card at the museum gift shop sees something else entire. … It’ll never strike anybody the same way and the great majority of people it will never strike in any deep way at all—but a really great painting is fluid enough to work its way into the mind and heart.”
But The Goldfinch is not bogged down by art history and the curiosities of sanding techniques for 18th century walnut chairs. Hobie expresses the accessibility of redemptive beauty: “Maybe for someone else, not a dealer, it wouldn’t be an object. It’d be a city, a color, a time of day. The nail where your fate is liable to catch and snag.”
In New York City, some 350 years after his death, Fabritius’ painting is hanging in a travelling exhibit in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. A young Theo Decker and his lovely mother stop by the Met on the way to a conference at school—Theo has gotten in trouble (again), this time for breaking into houses in the Hamptons with a friend. Theo’s mother leads him through the exhibit on the Dutch masters, detailing the backstory of each painting with a flourish, in just the manner that embarrasses a 14-year-old boy in public with his mother. She leaves him to face his sullenness alone while returning to a painting they passed earlier. A few minutes later, an explosion rocks the museum.
Theo wakes up to the debris—mangled bodies and mouthfuls of dust and canvas crushed under marble. An old man, dying, points at Fabritus’ “Goldfinch” on the wall. “’Take it with you! Go!’ His eyes were bright and wild.”
Theo avoids the bright lights of sirens and news cameras, the painting hidden under his shirt, and leaves through an employee exit. He and the “Goldfinch” are alone.
