Dying in the Rainbow Edge: Donna Tartt’s ‘The Goldfinch’

“And, in this staunch little portrait, it’s hard not to see the human in the finch. Dignified, vulnerable. One prisoner looking at another. But who knows what Fabritius intended? There’s not enough of his work left to even make a guess. The bird looks out at us. It’s not idealized or humanized. It’s very much a bird. Watchful, resigned. There’s no moral or story. There’s no resolution. There’s only a double abyss: between painter and imprisoned bird; between the record he left of the bird and our experience of it, centuries later.”

So… The Secret History is my soul book – the book you’d find scrawled all over my heart if you cared to claw it out of my corpse. I first devoured it in the abyss between Christmas and New Year’s in 2015 and have been saving The Goldfinch ever since with reverent trepidation. The imminent film necessitated that I finally take the plunge…

Only Donna Tartt could have done with those expectations what she did with them.

I’ve never read anything that so urgently and exquisitely articulates the sorcery of storycraft, the fierce ever-blazing truths beneath the ephemeral things, the numinous sublime Plato called Forms.

“And that’s why I’ve chosen to write these pages as I’ve written them. For only by stepping into the middle zone, the polychrome edge between truth and untruth, is it tolerable to be here and writing this at all.”

There’s a moment on the last page when every grace note and gradation rushes together into this utterly overwhelming crescendo and I was suddenly just weeping.

I think the cornerstone of DT’s corpus is this idea of the sublime, the nebulous light between realities where the reason to live resides. And somehow the story about a boy who walked into a museum with his mother on the eve of an explosion and left alone with a 17th-century painting fate saw him save from the rubble becomes a microcosm for not just the singular lifeline of art but the human condition itself.

Consider these two fragments, written three decades apart.

From The Secret History:

“There is nothing wrong with the love of Beauty. But Beauty—unless she is wed to something more meaningful—is always superficial. It is not that your Julian chooses solely to concentrate on certain, exalted things; it is that he chooses to ignore others equally as important.”

From The Goldfinch:

“Beauty alters the grain of reality. And I keep thinking too of the more conventional wisdom: namely, the pursuit of pure beauty is a trap, a fast track to bitterness and sorrow, that beauty has to be wedded to something more meaningful.”

And so what is meaning in DT’s worlds?

It resides in the flare of the rainbow edge, the polychrome space where reality, truth, illusion blur and mingle as bright and sudden as a match lit in a dark room. This is the eternal middle zone where all art and magic and love exists.

“And just as music is the space between notes, just as the stars are beautiful because of the space between them, just as the sun strikes raindrops at a certain angle and throws a prism of color across the sky–so the space where I exist, and want to keep existing, and to be quite frank I hope I die in, is exactly this middle distance: where despair struck pure otherness and created something sublime.”

Aaaand cue the weeping.

One of my most frequented founts of inspiration are interviews of favourites talking about craft and creativity and though there are vanishingly few of DT online every single one is just transcendent because, I mean, it’s her. “I am nothing in my soul if not obsessive”. Everything from that raven helm of hair to her immaculate suits to that adamantine genius lurking behind her liquid gold eyes… She is, quite simply, mesmerising. I could watch her talk for days.

On The Goldfinch in an interview with Kirsty Wark for Waterstones in 2013: “I’m painting a wall-sized mural with a brush the size of an eyelash”. She also references Ann Patchett’s soufflé as the ultimate metaphor for writing, folding in egg white after egg white to refine the consistency. And then in another interview with Wark for Newsnight, a recipe she also touches on again with Charlie Rose in 2014:

“Dickens goes so fast, he goes like lightning, but at the same time, any sentence you can lift up and it’s a marvel and it’s a miracle. So to me I want those two qualities, the two qualities of any great art: density and speed.”

And this is why she’s one of our greatest living writers.

The visceral command of the necessity of story, the breathless relentless turning of pages as you’re swept up in the lives of characters you cannot leave, and who indeed will never leave you, wed to scorching viscous language that has its own gravitational field, the language of fantasy as Sofia Samatar so bewitchingly phrases it: “It resides in language. Fantasy is death by owls. It’s mourning through gesture. It’s music, incantation in half-light. An inverted heart.”

The Goldfinch is so affecting because of this sacred marriage of density and speed. You’ll race through the pages in the haste to find out the circumstances that bring Theo to Amsterdam, what really happened in the horrific terrorist attack in which he loses his mother and acquires the eponymous painting that will shape the rest of his life, the complex web of relationships within which he is entangled along the way, from the gentle, warm sanctuary of Hobie and his shop, and the wild and fervent chaos that is Boris, to the stage-lit and singular Barbours, and the flame-haired enigma of Pippa, “the morphine lollipop”, his Zeno’s arrow to the last.

Because in Theo’s journey is the answer to everything, the reason for it all, the “secret whisper from an alleyway”, be it in “a cloud of unspeakable radiance” or “a beautiful flare of ruin”…

“In the midst of our dying, as we rise from the organic and sink back ignominiously into the organic, it is a glory and a privilege to love what Death doesn’t touch.”

This, this is the book I would put into the hands of someone contemplating oblivion.

“Then, suddenly, bursting into the last wisps of bioluminescence still trailing from the dream, the bells of the nearby church broke out in such violent clangor that I bolted upright in a panic, fumbling for my glasses. I had forgotten what day it was: Christmas.

Unsteadily, I got up and went to the window. Bells, bells. The streets were white and deserted. Frost glittered on tiled rooftops; outside, on the Herengracht, snow danced and flew. A flock of black birds was cawing and swooping over the canal, the sky was hectic with them, great sideways sweeps and undulations as a single, intelligent body, eddying to and fro, and their movement seemed to pass into me on almost a cellular level, white sky and whirling snow and the fierce gusting wind of poets.”