Reviews with content warning for Suicide - The Goldfinch

An incredibly smart and rich novel. I want to say it's one of the best things I've ever read. I love novels that keep my mind active and make me remember that I know how to read properly and read into things, and this is exactly that. I felt totally raw (and smarter) by the time I finished this book.

Content Warnings

bizzyizzybee's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional informative reflective sad tense slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

5.0

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melissagohard's review against another edition

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challenging dark sad slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.25

Loved the plot and overall vibe of the book but honestly it was about 300 pages longer than it needed to be. A lot of meandering and repetitive motifs. Still glad I read it but I think the emotional payoff would have been stronger with a more concise and tighter delivery.

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natalieweinberg's review against another edition

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challenging dark mysterious reflective tense slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.5

Content Warnings

afk2022's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.5

I find this a hard book to review largely because it is so big. While reading, it can feel slow, and dense, emotionally straining and frankly, obsessive and excessive in the descriptions of depression, suicide and drug use. I feel like Tartt is pulling all this into s grander narrative though. On one level it is about Theo, a boy who after a simply awful act of God fails to fulfil his potential, makes the wrong friends and enters a dark path, all while seeing others suffer along the way. We stay with Theo through all his downward spiral and bad decisions, and by the end of the novel he hasn’t really turned it around - he just intends to.

On the other hand, it is a novel about love. Love for people and love for concepts, really. It is about how love and care for something bigger than oneself can give one purpose and drive when life is hard, and how this purpose can help motivate you to take the next step. There’s this triangulation of the painting, his mother and Pippa. Theo obesses over all of them. But the painting casts the other two into relief. Theo ends up obsessing and loving the concept of his mother and Pippa, the memory as it were. The painting, arguably more of a concept than the other two, is more real to Theo, and helps him recontextualise his life to view the other two as what they are, concepts and ideas of memory. It’s an interesting way to explore how these “larger” concepts help illuminate the smaller, closer ones in our lives.

As usual with a Tartt novel, sexuality is ambiguous and I’m not sure what to say about that.

This novel isn’t for everyone, and I can see why it has received the criticism it has received to date. However, I do think it is brilliant both in scope and style, and in the way it explores the complexity of life, fate, choice, mortality and love.

Content Warnings

marianneiriss's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional reflective sad tense slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? No
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

Should you read The Goldfinch? Yes, but also no:

If you’ve read and enjoyed other long, slow, and at times frustrating books (for example, Crime and Punishment!), you like to read books with entirely unlikeable characters and unreliable narrators, and you don’t mind forays into odd, illogical, trains of thought and extremely long sentences - yes, definitely read The Goldfinch!

If you’ve read and enjoyed The Secret History, and you are hoping for something in the same vein of content/themes from The Goldfinch - I probably wouldn’t recommend it to you, because it’s honestly nothing like TSH, and I think you might be disappointed if you go into expecting it to be similar!

Personally, I thought that although it’s not an easy read, it was worth it. I’ve not been able to stop thinking about The Goldfinch since I finished last month.

I loved the lyrical writing - Donna Tartt has beautiful prose. And she captures this feeling of a kind of resigned despair so well, it pervades the entire book. I actually had to take a bit of a break from reading it at one point just to read something a bit less unhappy (I wouldn’t class this as ‘a sad book’ necessarily, but it is an unhappy book, at times desperately so). I’ve included some content warnings at the end of this review, and I would recommend looking into them before you decide to commit to reading The Goldfinch, as it does deal with heavy subject matter.

All this being said, I did think that it is a fantastic book overall, and if you’re currently battling through it I would recommend sticking with it, as you’ll be glad by the end that you did. Despite how frustrating it feels at times - I certainly felt like yelling at Theo “please, just don’t do that, just don’t” at multiple points! - it is well worth persevering with it.

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