Tartt isn’t pastiching the realist novel so much as updating it for our times. Tartt’s forensic prose is intent on tracing the unforeseeable consequences of the museum blast – not only for the characters who were present, but those yet to appear. The device deftly reminds us of Fabritius’s own death almost four centuries before, setting in place what Theo later describes as a “dreamlike mangle of past and present”. For our narrator, 13-year-old Theodore Decker, this begins with the shock of an explosion: a terrorist bomb destroys the wing of a New York museum. The novel progresses by exploring how matters of a moment unfurl unpredictably over time. The effect in the opening pages is challenging but oddly gripping, as if fictional time has slowed to that of real life. The Goldfinch exults in using three adjectives where one might suffice. Yet, despite its scale, this extraordinary work manages to remain intensely intimate, thanks largely to Tartt’s microscopic powers of description. Whereas the painting is modest (the goldfinch is no bigger than a goldfinch), the novel is vast: 771 pages. Tartt’s Goldfinch attempts something similar, but does so by expanding Fabritius’s canvas a trillion per cent. The Goldfinch, Donna Tartt’s keenly anticipated third novel, was inspired by Carel Fabritius’s painting of the same name – a mini-masterpiece whose fusion of hyper-realism and trompe l’oeil blurs the lines between art and life.
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