The Goldfinch – The Reluctant Psychoanalyst Reads Donna Tartt’s Pulitzer Prize Winning Novel

Editorial Note - 9/10/2019  I am expecting people to start accessing this post soon as the movie, made from the book, is coming out this weekend.  I have seen the film, and have posted on it here.  While I was waiting for the film to come out, I had some concerns about whether an 800 page book could be made into a film, especially because the writing style is based in the "flashbulb memory" function that is part and parcel of traumatic memory, as described below.  As a result of seeing the ads for the film I also reread the post and a couple head's up before you read it:  I assume, in the post (though not on all posts in this site) that you have read the book.  I hope that seeing the movie will suffice to orient you to the post.  If you have neither read the book nor seen the film, this may help prepare you for the film - though I think you may get a little lost in the read.  In any case, enjoy!


I hate this book!  It is disorienting.  I had to read the first bit three times and still couldn’t quite make sense of it.  There are places where just the simple math doesn’t add up.  There are sentences that were terrible.  Steven King reviewed this novel and he said that what you look for in an 800 page novel is that the wheels don’t fall off.  He feels that they don’t.  I think they wobble.  A lot.

I love this book!  The characters in this book are incredibly three dimensional, gritty and realistic – that is when they aren’t made of fairy dust and everything sweet and unbelievable.  The narrator is incredibly easy to identify with – a character who wanders through a crazy life, observing it, taking it in, and, for the most part, remaining largely unaware of the activity he is engaging in and his role in shaping the world that he will inhabit.  Even when he fires a gun, it feels like an accident rather than an intentional activity.

I think the things I hate about this book are, for the most part, intentional.  If not intentional, they are at least consistent with the central concern of the book, which is how trauma alters us.  How it takes who we are – the external and internal context of our lives - and splinters us so that we preserve, but also protect ourselves from the feelings of loss that we both want to know and not know, because knowing hurts too deeply.  I suspect that the book won the Pulitzer in part because it portrays a post 9/11 America – one that is splintered and confused – and this portrayal is primarily in the psychological functioning of the central characters, but we also see, almost as an added bonus, the decadent American world that they are walking through.

The central image is the Goldfinch, a pivotal and enigmatic painting that lands in the lap of the protagonist.  It is a simple painting.  A goldfinch is chained, by a delicately wrought bracelet, to its perch.  It was painted by a Dutch Master who died young, and, fittingly, violently, in a gunpowder factory explosion.  Fittingly because, in the book, the painting comes into the hands of the boy as the result of a violent explosion.  The boy then becomes as chained to the painting as the goldfinch is to his perch.  But the boy is attached to more than the painting; he is attached to his mother and then to his father, to his friend Boris – one of the too real characters – to another survivor of the blast and the man who cares for both survivors whom he meets as the result of the blast.  But also, and most directly, he is attached to the actions that he takes, despite his sense that they emerge largely on their own.

The painting itself is also, in the way that it is painted, a representation of the book (or vice versa).  It is a masterpiece.  The painting is a piece of trompe l’oeil painted in 1654 by Carel Fabritius.  It is both tantalizing in its realistic depiction of the bird, and has modern strokes that look like impressionist dollops of paint.  In other words, it is, despite the simplicity of the subject and the sparseness of the execution, an incredibly complex, dense and engaging work of art.

The other works of art in this book are produced by Hobie, the accidental caregiver who takes in Theo, the main character.  Hobie is an adorable bear of a man who has learned a great deal about the restoration of the finest pieces of furniture.  For his own amusement, he cobbles together bits of cast off furniture and creates Frankensteinian monsters that are beautiful in their own way – again, I think, like this book, which Stephen King notes, borrows heavily from prior masters, especially Charles Dickens.  And the painting and the furniture, not just in their content, but in their execution resemble the inner world of the traumatized Theo.  He hangs onto the adoration of his mother, to the style of his father (which he imitates without quite knowing that he is doing it), to his connections to other trauma survivors – Boris who has been through hell with his own Dad – and Pippa, the other survivor of the explosion, but also to Hobie, the caregiver.

The violent explosion that sets this book in motion is, from the perspective of Theo, entirely and totally random.  Oh, sure, there were specific things that lead him to be in the museum on a school day, but that the explosion happened at that moment is random and all that flows from it feels strangely, oddly, accidental, including the very basics of his existence; that he is alive.

A relatively recent article that I read about the psychoanalytic treatment of combat trauma suggests that part of the reason that PTSD is not more frequent than it is among warriors is that they are frequently able to connect with each other – and that this connection with another survivor helps them to feel less fragmented – less cut off from the world.  They are able to begin healing the wound before it becomes unbridgeable.  Theo is drawn to Pippa but she is evanescent – out of reach, intermittently present and therefor more disturbing than comforting – creating a desire for connection rather than an actual one.  The relationship with Boris is more complex – he is present and helps Theo navigate the ongoing traumatic situations that they face, but he is also hardened to the world by his own lonely history of trauma and this makes him an interesting mirror – a fun house mirror that is distorting – but also makes him essentially inaccessible to Theo.

So Theo is on his own.  He turns to various others but it is Hobie that provides the anchor and the fulcrum that he uses to move forward with his life.  And Theo does this not as a passive recipient of care, but as an active provider of care, offering organization and income to Hobie.  In fact, the generosity of his actions blinds he, and us, to the greater danger that he poses to Hobie.  We avoid recognizing what a cad he is, as does he, because his motives are pure – his wishes simple – at least apparently.

Theo is, like each of us, and like America itself, blind to how complex his motivation is and to the manifold unintended consequences that must, inevitably, arise from his actions.  When they come, in the particularly virulent form that they do, he is blindsided and dumbfounded, taken aback by just how out of kilter things are, at least some aspects of which we have been painfully aware for a very long time.  Despite our awareness and discomfort, we are still surprised (or at least I am) by the savagery that his actions unleash.  We are surprised by the actions in the world and the actions within the character that he becomes, without being conscious of it, very actively engaged in directly observable aggressive behavior.  And it disorients him further.  This is not who he is, he says to himself, as if it were someone else who were doing all that he is so apparently doing.

The book begins near the end of the story, when Theo is in the process of reeling from the trauma that he has brought on himself – though it feels like it is visited on him by powers outside of himself.  The rest of the book is told in flashback, and it would seem that we would get that we are, then, working forward to this inevitable moment with which we began.  It seems that we should know where all of this leads.  But even with the advantage of knowing the future, we can’t predict it, and hurtle towards it blissfully unaware – sort of like a teenager who will inevitably be told “I told you so,” but not get it because, though he was told, it didn’t make any sense.

The disorientation in this book is, mercifully not Kafkaesque.  The author is not engaged (hopefully), as Kafka was, in a vision that became the holocaust.  After all, it is told not from the perspective of the oppressed but from the perspective of the disoriented, traumatized person of privilege, who is traumatized not just by the intensity of the experience, but by the sense of disorientation that comes from discovering that the privilege of the position is not impervious to the environment but dependent on it.  The book is disorienting in the ways that we can feel after watching too much television – as if the turning of the day into night, the events that have been going on around us, aren’t really real, but are imaginary.  And this dream – and how can trauma that simply falls out of the sky feel like anything but a dream – feels ephemeral and unreal as do our resulting actions.  But those actions are real and have real consequences.

Suffice it to say that this book, despite its length, mirrors life and does not wrap itself neatly in a bow.  Instead the world continues to move forward.  Despite that, I did not feel, as I frequently do, a wish for the story to continue.  Not just because 800 pages had worn me out, but because there was something quite satisfying in all that had been stirred and the time that had been spent looking at the resulting swirls.  I felt like a customer in Hobie’s store – one who had used a mirror to inspect the underside of his furniture, who had seen in the width of the grain that this was modern lumber, not ancient, a person who knew this was not an original piece of work – it is not one that should command a price because of its age and the contact that I would have with an original master through owning some of her work, but knowing instead that it was a contemporary monstrosity – one that is cobbled together out of the bits and pieces of the modern world.  And that, despite its monstrous quality, despite the tacky and sleazy corners, the overall perspective is pleasing and that I will buy this work of art – not as a forgery or a derivative product – but as something that has virtue in its own right – despite its flaws.

Will the world continue to embrace us despite our flaws?  Can we avoid hurtling towards inevitable moments of unintended violence that we barely acknowledge?  Can we free ourselves from the beautifully wrought ball and chain of inherited violence?  We are probably no more free, and perhaps less so, than Theo.  We are no more self-aware, perhaps less so, and our experience is splintered by the traumas we have survived, small and large, some of us more so than others.  Despite this, we have the capacity to make amends.  We have the capacity to struggle to integrate what seems so desperately disparate.  Perhaps, like Theo, we will survive to live and appreciate a new day and the irony of it all.


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