![]() ![]() ![]() Bristling with Dickensian characters, including a Faginesque antiques dealer, an Artful Dodger of a best friend, and a soulful red-haired girl who, like Theo, survived the explosion only to be defined by it, the book is unapologetically nineteenth-century in sensibility, but firmly twenty-first century in resonance.Īrt’s secret history, its capacity to speak to us powerfully across time, the serendipity and faith involved in creating it-these are the themes that excite Tartt, who was in the Netherlands promoting her first novel when she found herself drawn to Fabritius’s painting and the extraordinary fact of its survival: Most of the young artist’s work was destroyed in the massive Delft gunpowder-arsenal explosion that took his life. So begins Theo’s odyssey through contemporary America, one that takes him from the Park Avenue home of a classmate’s troubled society family to a post–real estate bust Las Vegas wasteland, where he lives for a time with his ne’er-do-well father. Like her previous books, it features a protagonist hovering precariously between innocence and experience: thirteen-year-old Theo Decker, whose mother is killed when a terrorist’s bomb goes off at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, leaving him alone and unmoored, with a painting-none other than The Goldfinch-tucked in his bag. ![]() ![]() A decade in the writing and nearly 800 pages in length, her new novel is a large-canvas, small-brush picaresque that’s both heartrending and irresistibly wicked. ![]()
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