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Reading in Montreal: Donna Tartt’s “The Goldfinch”

To and from Montreal last weekend I carried Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch, a 771 page hardback. No regrets.

I had a wonderful time in Montreal, visiting my sweet son Evan, who’s a student at McGill University. I was smiling ear to ear at the prospect of spending a weekend with him in a world city, eating steak frites and drinking bols of cafe au lait. Also, stopping in at the Musee des Beaux Arts for a mostly forgettable exhibit of Venetian art and musical instruments from the Renaissance and a wholly memorable show of photographs, by Canadians, from the 70’s. http://www.mbam.qc.ca/en/

Even with all the touring and eating, I had lots of time to read: waiting for and during Porter Airlines very civilized flights and at my chic hotel, Le Meridien Versailles. www.lemeridienversailleshotel.com. I read mornings before our day would begin and nights after the day had ended.

It’s a behemoth of a book (Kindle, I know! But I don’t like reading on a device.) Truly, I should have been charged a baggage fee.

I’m not complaining! I love an oversized read. Like a Charles Dickens’ novel — and this is most certainly a twist on a Dickens novel — this book kept me company.

Thirteen year old New Yorker Theo Decker loses his stylish mother in a terrorist blast at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. There, Theo is given an unusual gold ring from a dying man, the name of a shop, and a priceless Dutch painting, Carel Fabritus’ 1654 The Goldfinch, no bigger than a laptop.

The ring brings Theo to a Greenwich Village address that will one day be his home and place of work. Before and after that, the story takes our hero — and that painting — from New York to Las Vegas to New York and on to Amsterdam. Along the way, Theo steals and abuses drugs and alcohol, rescues a dog, fakes the provenance of antiques, falls into a disloyal love, loses the painting, and gets involved in a fatal shoot-out over that painting. Suicidal, he receives a ghostly visit from…

This read is best understood as a mash up Dickens’ Great Expectations and Dan Chaon’s gothic thriller Await Your Reply.

Tartt is a smooth writer. I never once lost interest in the story, in spite of her preachiness, her tendency to tell instead of show. (Theo is in love with Pippa: got it. Art is worth saving and sharing with all mankind. Noted.) I didn’t even especially like Theo — mmm, a drug abusing art thief — but I stayed with this story.

What a cast of characters! I especially enjoyed the well-drawn Barbour family, and Hobie, the antique-furniture expert who opens his heart and home and business to Theo.

I finished The Goldfinch on the last leg of my journey back to Chicago. Did I love it? No. Can I recommend it? Yes. It was a fat long read, a welcome travel companion.

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