The Secret Author

The Goldfinch
By Donna Tartt

Secrets are sort of a theme for Donna Tartt, aren't they? The Mississippi-born novelist first rose to best seller status with a book called "The Secret History," which she started writing while still an undergraduate at Bennington College. There was a 10-year gap before her next novel, "The Little Friend," which was also a best seller and also concerned a terrible secret or two. "The Goldfinch"came more than 10 years later (supposedly, it was originally scheduled for publication in 2008, but didn't come out until last year) and, again, explores how a secret carried too long can turn a person inside out. It's also a best seller and, despite weighing in at almost 800 pages, you can crack it open on your next bus or train ride and someone will tell you that their friend is reading it too and says it's great.

I really liked "The Goldfinch," or I think I did. The whole time I was reading I kept thinking I was going to decide I hated it at any moment. Maybe I'm just a jerk that way, but it's to Tartt's credit as a writer that I kept turning the pages even when I wanted to take the main character by the lapels and give him a good shake.

As the story begins, Theo Decker is a 13-year-old boy whose mother has been killed in a terrorist attack at a museum in New York. As a way of getting the reader to feel compassion toward her main character, this is kind of stacking the deck. Still, the passages of the novel where he drags himself out of the rubble of the museum and waits for his mother to come home are almost unbearably sad. Tartt gives us a powerful depiction of his shock and grief. It's impossible for a decent person to read this section of the novel and not feel sympathy for Theo - or at least for all the real-life kids in his position.

In the rest of the novel, Tartt decides to put the reader's sympathy with Theo to the test.

I really enjoyed how Theo started to rebuild his personality after he meets up with Hobie, an avuncular saint of a man who teaches him about restoring old antiques. However, at the same time I was enjoying it I was thinking, "Well, here she's showing off how much research she did into the antique furniture trade." And the outline of this part of the story - sad orphan boy learns self-respect through secretly learning a trade - is sort of a trope of young adult fiction.

But Tartt doesn't give us the satisfaction of seeing Theo go through a familiar type of character growth, and she doesn't stick with that trope for long. The haunted boy Theo turns into the haunted young man Theo. Tartt shifts Theo's story ahead by months or years at a couple of points in the novel, and hops across America and to Europe at other points. Through almost all of it, Theo stubbornly hangs onto a secret that could destroy him, and  even acquires more potentially devastating secrets. You may read "The Goldfinch" and shout, "Just get rid of it!" at Theo more than once. But hey, he's not the only one. Most of the people in his life have terrible secrets of their own.