2021 Summer Reading Recommendations:
The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt

We don’t get to choose our own hearts. . . . We don’t get to choose the people we are.” Donna Tartt’s words reveal a profound aspect of the human experience: we are affected and shaped by a world outside of our control. The events and experiences of our lives force us to grow, forming who we are as persons. Tartt, however, is pointing to something much more complicated than a mere deterministic understanding of reality. We respond to these events, even as they affect us. Tartt wants us to reflect on both how we respond to the events of our lives and how these experiences have shaped us into the people we are today. 

She explores this idea in her Pulitzer Prize winning book, The Goldfinch. The novel begins in a hotel room in Amsterdam with the young man Theodore Decker reflecting upon his life. Although we are not sure why he is in Amsterdam or how he got there, we are immediately seized by his overwhelming sense of sorrow. The reader walks with Theo as he explores the grief held within him, which began with the tragic loss of his mother in a bombing and gradually increased as he entered and coped with a world of ugliness and suffering. Over the years, Theo’s external stability gradually hardens into a facade that hides his inner turmoil. While he finds a certain amount of happiness in friendship and beauty, his inner struggle continues to rage until the breaking point—as he paces a hotel room in solitude and sadness in Amsterdam. He holds onto the hope of lasting beauty and the return of real happiness as he clings to a work of art that has survived the devastation of time, The Goldfinch. 

The Goldfinch is a mature novel for a mature reader. Tartt does not hold back in exploring the darker parts of life, from illegal art trading to teenage drug use. The book is realistic and pragmatic, delving into the ways in which grief and sorrow, friendship and love affect our lives. Tartt shows us how these experiences and our response to them affect who we are and the persons we become, for good and for ill. As Theo learns, his heart is at the mercy of the world around him, and in this sense it is not his own. But he remains the master of his life and can choose how to respond to the lot he has been given. 

This seems to be at the core of Donna Tartt’s message. Even as the world is outside of our control, we can choose how to live in it. 

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Image: Carel Fabritius, The Goldfinch