The Goldfinch Reviewed

 

I confess. I did something I rarely do. I didn't finish this book. It spent a year on my nightstand and I read up to page 565 of its 771 pages (73%). At night, I turned to where I'd left off a few days ago, a week ago, a month ago, and then I'd put it back and pick up something more entertaining. 

Yeah. I know. National Bestseller. Pulitzer Prize. It's all right there on the cover. But still, by the time I quit, this book had become a sort of torture. 

It started out fine. I rooted for Theo with the same conviction I had rooted for Pip in Great Expectations. But as the pages wore on, the misfortunes and poor decisions took their toll--on me. When Theo's loser friend Boris shows up again I just couldn't take it. I knew it would ruin everything in Theo's life and I didn't feel like actually reading that again. 

Don't get me wrong. The prose is beautiful. I felt like I, the country bumpkin, had been transformed into a native New Yorker. That I was in scorched Las Vegas or waterlogged Amsterdam. And the theme was there. The painting represents his mother or his lost innocence or the boyhood lost to fate. Or perhaps, what might have been--the happiness he might have known. Or it represented all those things at once.

It's just that the plot got repetitive and depressing. Maybe you have a stronger constitution than I. Maybe you can withstand page after page of tortuous misfortune heaped on a teenage boy. If so, go ahead and read it. The book does have other qualities. But I was too weak for >700 pages of such a plot.