They drink, take drugs, commit petty crimes, pursue girls in a half-hearted way. After his mother’s death he goes to stay with the rich, elegant and sometimes insufferable Barbour family on Park Avenue, later becoming engaged to the daughter, Kitsey.īut in between the bomb and the betrothal is a great deal of incident - sometimes chaotic, often deeply moving, occasionally unexpectedly comic - including a spell in Las Vegas with his errant father, a man addicted first to alcohol, then gambling, and saddled with a floozy girlfriend named Xandra, a house on an unfinished subdivision in the desert and finally with debts he can’t possibly pay off.Īt Theo’s new school in Vegas, he befriends Boris, the son of a brutish Ukrainian oil worker. Theo holds on to the painting, becoming increasingly obsessed with it over the years. Characters will certainly go off the rails, but the plot won’t. She’ll wrong-foot us, but she won’t cheat us. Her novels always feature surprising, in some cases preposterous, narrative elements, but she makes us believe them. One of the greatest of Tartt’s many gifts is her ability to assure readers that they’re in the hands of a trustworthy storyteller. The stakes are higher, and the characters, drawn from a wider social milieu, are downright more interesting. More ambitious and accomplished than “The Secret History,” the narrative is tauter even as the book’s scope is wider, with events spanning a decade or more and scenes set in multiple locations in America and Europe. Tartt’s latest, “The Goldfinch” - only her third novel in 20-plus years - coheres magnificently. Her previous novel, the self-consciously Southern Gothic “The Little Friend,” was, despite its promising subject matter of meth and death, a little lacking in plot and disappointed some fans of her debut, “The Secret History.”
And without a great plot, any thriller - even a beautifully written and very literary one - falls apart.
Nobody would file the novels of Donna Tartt under “thrillers.” But that is what she writes.
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