Helpful Score: 6
I liked this book more as I went along (after the first 50 pages I almost quit on it) but it was EASILY 200 pages too long. Tartt's writing is beautiful but endless descriptions for description's sake become tiresome. I think the basic story, plot line, and characters were all good (although WHERE were the competent adults in this book?!), but it seems like she was determined to make this book an epic by writing and writing when it could have read just as well with judicious editing. I haven't read her other two novels so I can't speak to how this one compares, but I feel as though many of the reviewers were swept up in her (admittedly masterful) use of prose and didn't take into account the readability of this novel. I would probably still recommend the book but be aware you'll have to trudge your way through parts and it's a long go of it.
Helpful Score: 4
For better or for worse, The Goldfinch seems to be the book that everyone is talking about. At first I thought it was just a local thing (Donna Tartt is a native Mississippian and we do love our home-grown authors) but then it won the Pulitzer. It was about this time that my book club went rogue and insisted that we read it immediately. Now, 800-something pages later, I'm trying to decide whether I liked it or not.
My initial thought was that it would have been twice the book at half the length. Theo leads a very tragic, depressing, and self-destructive life, and Tartt describes every moment of it in painstaking detail. It was interesting enough to keep me reading, but it was also emotionally exhausting. This is a character study of very broken people who are consumed by depravity, and there is very little about this story that offers any glimmer of hope or redemption.
Then, after dutifully footslogging through 800 pages of woeful minutiae, Tartt rewarded my efforts with an ending so vague and poorly realized that it felt like nothing more than a hastily written afterthought. It seemed to devalue everything that I had just read, making all that hard work to become invested in the characters seem like a waste. Why would she spend so much time holding the threads of this plot so closely, only to let them fall apart so carelessly at the very end?
The Goldfinch is an oddly beautiful book with very well drawn characters, but it suffers from being too much in the beginning and middle and not enough at the end. It is one of those books where a lot is going on but nothing really happens, and the conclusion (what little of it there is) leaves you wondering what the point of it really was after all.
Is it a book worth reading? I really havent decided yet. The general consensus seems to be that the ending, which was disappointing and unrewarding, managed to spoil whatever positives the rest of the book had to offer. The natural answer to the question of Are you glad you read it? seems to be Yes, but Unfortunately, that is about the best answer that I can come up with as well.
My initial thought was that it would have been twice the book at half the length. Theo leads a very tragic, depressing, and self-destructive life, and Tartt describes every moment of it in painstaking detail. It was interesting enough to keep me reading, but it was also emotionally exhausting. This is a character study of very broken people who are consumed by depravity, and there is very little about this story that offers any glimmer of hope or redemption.
Then, after dutifully footslogging through 800 pages of woeful minutiae, Tartt rewarded my efforts with an ending so vague and poorly realized that it felt like nothing more than a hastily written afterthought. It seemed to devalue everything that I had just read, making all that hard work to become invested in the characters seem like a waste. Why would she spend so much time holding the threads of this plot so closely, only to let them fall apart so carelessly at the very end?
The Goldfinch is an oddly beautiful book with very well drawn characters, but it suffers from being too much in the beginning and middle and not enough at the end. It is one of those books where a lot is going on but nothing really happens, and the conclusion (what little of it there is) leaves you wondering what the point of it really was after all.
Is it a book worth reading? I really havent decided yet. The general consensus seems to be that the ending, which was disappointing and unrewarding, managed to spoil whatever positives the rest of the book had to offer. The natural answer to the question of Are you glad you read it? seems to be Yes, but Unfortunately, that is about the best answer that I can come up with as well.
