5 Reasons I’ve Read The Goldfinch So Many Times

The rare Pulitzer Prize-winner that was also a smash commercial hit, Donna Tartt’s 2013 opus The Goldfinch is one for the ages. Almost a young adult novel for full-on adults, it’s the coming-of-age story of teenager Theo Decker, and how he’s basically alone in the world. (There’s a reason his charming degenerate friend Boris calls him “Potter.”) It starts with a terrorist attack at an art museum, and involves his safekeeping of the stolen masterpiece The Goldfinch by Dutch master Carol Fabritius. That secret, and the painting itself, follow Theo through profound grief, being shuttled around from home to home, and into adulthood. The Goldfinch is a perfect, dense, and extremely rich novel. It’s worth reading, of course, but it’s also worth re-reading. Here are some reasons why…or at least my reasons why.
It’s a masterclass in fiction writing
Writers should read as much as they can. Reading good books inspire writers to up their game, and if they’re read carefully and with a very critical eye, they can teach actual technical elements of writing. The Goldfinch is the kind of book that should be read by people who want to know how to write, and by writers who want to know how to write better. I don’t know how many times over the past three years when, struck by a case of writer’s block, or merely stuck somewhere in novel writing, I turned to The Goldfinch to absorb how proper fiction writing ought to be done. Particularly when it came to pacing—I would worry that some scenes that I really enjoyed writing went on for far too long, or didn’t advance the plot of my book in a meaningful way. Should I “kill my darlings,” as many literary icons have recommended? Or, should I take a lesson from The Goldfinch…and, you know, don’t? There are many, many scenes in this gargantuan novel that don’t actively or obviously move things along. But that’s okay. Not every book has to be tightly structured. It’s just fine, and extraordinarily pleasant, in the case of The Goldfinch, to just have long scenes devoted to setting, character building, or even quiet moments. Those parts do move things forward, in their own way, along with just allowing the reader to spend a little more time in the precious world of the book.

Donna Tartt’s description of places
Not only does Tartt fearlessly world-build, and create dozens of indelible characters, but her sense of place is positively delicious. The Goldfinch takes place primarily in two places. Young (and later older) Theo bops around various neighborhoods in New York City, and he has a long spell in Las Vegas. Both of these cities have been well-covered and romanticized throughout books and pop culture, but Tartt describes them like nobody else. For example, New York isn’t presented as per usual as a gritty, exciting, ever-changing entity. Instead, The Goldfinch longs for a dying New York, the one of Upper East Side old-money families, boarding school kids, and respected artisans (like furniture restorer Hobie) quietly plying their trade in the small shops they’ve occupied for decades. As for Las Vegas, the book rarely sees the famous Strip, but focuses instead on the empty houses and empty days of life in the sprawling exurbs in the desert outside of Sin City. These are places not recently or often covered in literature, and Tartt makes them both feel extremely real.
Because the audiobook version is just as good
Truth be told, the first time I “read” The Goldfinch, I didn’t technically “read it.” I did what a lot of people do when they say they read a book in that I listened to the audiobook version. But I loved the novel so much that I wanted to absorb it again, in a different way, and I totally got to because of the method by which I’d consumed it the first time. This is highly recommended when finding a book you love. No matter the order in which you do it—reading first, audiobook second, or in my case, audiobook first, reading second—you notice new things and get to experience the book with different parts of your brain. It also helps that The Goldfinch audiobook is an exceptional work of radio theater and performance. Reader David Pittu gives a stunning performance, concocting singular, separate voices for every character (and there are a lot of them in The Goldfinch) along with fully-fleshed out characterizations behind them.

My wife told me I should
Book recommendations are a powerful thing, and giving them to someone you care about is an act of true love. It’s flattering to be asked for suggestions on what to read next, and one that many of us take very seriously; matching up person to title. It’s pretty intimate. Conversely, to be recommended books without asking by someone you care about is akin to them saying “I love you and also this book so much that I want you to be together.” My wife got into The Goldfinch (and subsequently Tartt’s other novels, The Secret History and The Little Friend, which are also amazing, of course) and she got me into The Goldfinch. She said to read it, and I trust her implicitly, because she’s smart and she knows me well. Her book and music recommendations for me have never been wrong. When your partner tells you to read something, just do it.
Because there’s stuff I missed
I’m not the first person to define a classic novel as one that you can return to over and over again and find a new layer, or nuance, or something you missed every time. The Goldfinch is a classic novel. It’s also a very, very long novel—nearly 800 pages—so there’s a lot going on. Great works of art are impossible to absorb all at once, and therein lies the delight. You don’t have to read classic novels over and over again to get them into your system, you get to come back to them, hopefully at different stages of life, and ascertain more and more delights.
How many times have you read The Goldfinch?