![]() ![]() For much of the novel he is a hapless adolescent, but when we first meet him, at the start of the novel, he is twenty-something, and hiding out in Holland. Theo, the narrator of The Goldfinch does precisely this, struggling through his own anomie and loneliness, struggling with post-traumatic stress and a fractured moral centre. Instead, events and consequences roll indifferently on, unconcerned by fairness or justice or right, leaving the narrator to stumble through an attempt to make sense of what is in fact almost entirely random. The world is not restored to order at the end of her novels the guilty are not punished, or the innocent rewarded. To this extent they possess a family resemblance to crime fiction but they refuse to obey its conventions. ![]() ![]() They also explore the difficult world of adolescence, with their principal characters either witness to, or active participants in, those crimes. ![]() Her novels possess a signature of sorts: crisply polished prose, perfect syntax, beautifully observed places and events, tricky characters, and unresolved crimes. Donna Tartt has produced just one novel a decade so far: The Secret History, which came out in 1992 to enormous success The Little Friend, ten years later, which barely rippled the surface of the literary world and now The Goldfinch, which I suspect will achieve at least the standing of her first novel. ![]()
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