The Goldfinch

Donna Tartt

At the time of its publication, in 2013, Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch was called “Dickensian” enough times to draw a slightly huffy correction from Francine Prose in her excellent review for New York Review of Books, which contrasted its elaborate and sometimes baffling descriptions with Dickens’ expert scene setting. Stephen King was one of those who called it Dickensian, in The New York Times. He had in mind the novel’s reliance on “mere happenstance”, and what he saw as the resemblance of a major character to the Artful Dodger. But he is a different kind of writer from Prose, and I suspect he along with a few other critics was first reminded of Dickens by The Goldfinch because of its length, the one formal aspect of a work you can register before you start reading it, and on which subject he starts his review: “Let us consider the problems of the long novel, in which the heft is apt to come in for almost as much critical examination as the content.” He will go on to say with remarkable confidence that “In this hurry-scurry age, big books are viewed with suspicion, and sometimes disdain”, though Tartt’s big debut, The Secret History, had weathered such suspicion very well and was well reviewed. Like Prose, he notes that The Goldfinch is both “large and dense”, and I would add that it is partly this scale and texture which make it, like King’s large and dense It, enjoyable.