The Goldfinch
A boy survives a bombing at the Met and steals a small Dutch painting. Tartt spent eleven years writing a Dickensian novel about grief, addiction, beauty, and the objects we cling to, and the result won the Pulitzer despite the literary establishment's best efforts to dismiss it. The book is too alive to stay in any critical box. Readers voted with their obsession.
The book is strong for roughly its first two hundred pages, and then several readers admit they stalled once the story relocated to a Las Vegas suburb, two burned-out teenagers drinking and drifting with no forward motion. A reader complains the narrator “doesn’t SOUND like a boy” at points, breaking trust in his own account, and another calls the accumulated bad luck relentless, adding there is “no humor of any kind whatsoever.” One reviewer dismisses the whole enterprise as “indulgent, pretentious, bloated and unconvincing.” A sharper critic argues the tone and story “belong in children’s literature.”
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
