"Why am I made the way I am? Why do I care about all the wrong things, and nothing at all for the right ones? Or, to tip it another way: how can I see so clearly that everything I love or care about is illusion, and yet -- for me, anyway -- all that's worth living for lies in that charm? A great sorrow, and one that I am only beginning to understand: we don't get to choose our own hearts. We can't make ourselves want what's good for us or what's good for other people. We don't get to choose the people we are."
Reading like as many as five books in one, Donna Tartt's "The Goldfinch" comes on like a fever dream at times, following the Dickensian journey of Theo Decker as he searches for and finds father figures, mother figures, brother figures, and idolized loves.
"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 then is thoroughly my own fault, still when I lost her I lost sight of any landmark that might have led me someplace happier, to some more populated or congenial life. Her death the dividing mark: Before and After."
Theo's friend Boris is a force of nature, and must be included among the more memorable characters in recent literary history. While providing comic relief, Boris also allows Tartt to explore undertones of homosexuality that permeate the story.
"Americans ... movie stars ... TV people ... they name their kids like Apple and Blanket and Bear and Bastard and all kind of crazy things."
"And your point is -- ?"
"My point is like, democracy is excuse for any fucking thing. Violence ... greed ... stupidity ... anything is ok if Americans do it. Right? Am I right?"
"More than anything I was relieved that in my unfamiliar babbling-and-wanting-to-talk state I'd stopped myself from blurting the thing on the edge of my tongue, the thing I'd never said, even though it was something we both knew well enough without me saying it out loud to him in the street -- which was, of course, I love you."
The cast of characters includes Pippa, a mercurial personage on the edge of Theo's reality, and Theo's mother pervades every scene -- however, it is Theo's relationship with Hobie that is the engine of this novel.
" ... Short term boredom and long term pain, temporary panic and permanent desperation striking all at once and flaring up in such an ashen desolate light that I saw, really saw, looking back down the years and with all clear-headed and articulate despair, that the world and everything in it was intolerably and permanently fucked and nothing had ever been good or okay, unbearable claustrophobia of the soul, the windowless room, no way out, waves of shame and horror, leave me alone, my mother dead on a marble floor, stop it stop it, muttering aloud to myself in elevators, in cabs, leave me alone, I want to die ..."
Tartt's staggering work is a lengthy read that occasionally struggles with chronology and an ending that can strike as a bit over the top. There are elements of "Shutter Island" or even "Fight Club" that are effective, but also cast some doubt on the narrator.
But the end result is intensely moving, run through with a rhythm and zest for life -- and death -- that rightly propels "The Goldfinch" among the best literary works of the 21st century.
"And I add my own love to the history of people who have loved beautiful things, and looked out for them, and pulled them from the fire, and sought them when they were lost, and tried to preserve them and save them while passing them along literally from hand to hand, singing out brilliantly from the wreck of time to the next generation of lovers, and the next."
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