“Its tone, language, and story belong in children’s literature,” wrote critic James Wood, in The New Yorker. The Goldfinch a “rapturous” symphony? Not so fast, they say.
Tartt can now reach, how seamlessly she can combine the immediate and tactile with more wide-angled concerns.” According to best-selling phenomenon Stephen King, who reviewed it for The New York Times Book Review, “ ‘The Goldfinch’ is a rarity that comes along perhaps half a dozen times per decade, a smartly written literary novel that connects with the heart as well as the mind.”īut, in the literary world, there are those who profess to be higher brows still than The New York Times-the secret rooms behind the first inner sanctum, consisting, in part, of The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, and The Paris Review, three institutions that are considered, at least among their readers, the last bastions of true discernment in a world where book sales are king and real book reviewing has all but vanished. It’s a work that shows us how many emotional octaves Ms. Michiko Kakutani, the chief New York Times book reviewer for 31 years (and herself a Pulitzer winner, in criticism), called it “a glorious Dickensian novel, a novel that pulls together all remarkable storytelling talents into a rapturous, symphonic whole. It’s also gotten some of the severest pans in memory from the country’s most important critics and sparked a full-on debate in which the naysayers believe that nothing less is at stake than the future of reading itself.
In April it won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, the judges of which praised it as “a book that stimulates the mind and touches the heart.” It’s been on the New York Times best-seller list for seven months, sold a million and a half print and digital copies, and drawn a cornucopia of rave reviews, including one in the daily New York Times and another in the Sunday New York Times Book Review. The novel is already on its way to becoming a movie, or a TV series, made by the producers of The Hunger Games. New York’s Frick Collection, which in October began exhibiting the painting for which the book was named, hadn’t seen so much traffic in years. When The Goldfinch came out, last fall, recipients of advance copies promptly showed off their galleys on Instagram, as if announcing the birth of a child.
“Have you read The Goldfinch yet?” Consider it the cocktail-party conversation starter of 2014, the new “Are you watching Breaking Bad?” Eleven years in the making, 784 pages long, the book has re-ignited the cult of Donna Tartt, which began in 1992 with her sensational debut novel, The Secret History.
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