The Goldfinch

Donna Tartt, The Goldfinch (2013).

A rich tapestry of a novel which moves from childhood tragedy to misdemeanors and felonies, art and antiques. Some most memorable secondary characters, especially Hobie and Boris.

One of my “top fifty” because of passages like these:

• Things would have turned out better if she had lived. As it was, she died when I was a kid; and though everything that’s happened to me since is thoroughly my own fault, still when I lost her I lost sight of any landmark that might have led someplace happier, to some more populated or congenial life. p. 7.
• . . . I was worried that my exuberant drug use had damaged my brain and my nervous system and maybe even my soul in some irreparable and perhaps not readily apparent way. p. 380.
• And yet I was grateful for the work because it kept me too mentally bludgeoned to think. The shame that tormented me was all the more corrosive for having no clear origin: I didn’t know why I felt so tainted, and worthless, and wrong — only that I did, and whenever I looked up from my books I was swamped by slimy waters rushing in from all sides. p. 392.
• It didn’t occur to me then, though it certainly does now, that it was years since I’d roused myself from my stupor of misery and self-absorption; between anomie and trance, inertia and parenthesis and gnawing my own heart out, there were a lot of small, easy, everyday kindnesses I’d missed out on; and even the word kindness was like rising from unconsciousness into some hospital awareness of voices, and people, from a stream of digitized machines. p. 470.
• “Accidents, catastrophes — something like seventy-five per cent of disaster victims are convinced there were warning signs they brushed off or didn’t pick up on correctly, and with children under eighteen, the percentage is even higher. But that doesn’t mean the signs weren’t there, does it?” pp. 615-16.
• Something in me had gone dead at the sight of him, almost like with my dad when I was a kid, long hours alone at home, the involuntary wave of relief at his key in the lock and then the immediate heartsink at the actual sight of him. p. 731.
• “. . . good doesn’t always follow from good deeds, nor bad deeds result from bad, does it? Scary idea!” p. 745.
• “Can’t good come sometimes through some strange back doors?” p. 758.
• Shock and aura. p. 760.
• [We always hear] “Follow your heart.” Only here’s what I really, really want someone to explain to me. What if one happens to be possessed of a heart that can’t be trusted — ? p. 761.

This is the best of her three once-a-decade books, and here’s the kicker — it has been 10 years since it was published.