The Goldfinch is Great Expectations spliced with a stoner novel. I loved the first 150 pages or so. Then it became a chore that provoked rage. I read the next 300 pages dutifully, cursing Donna Tartt for the audacity of thinking she could write 700 pages of this drivel and get away with it. Then I had lunch with a friend who had suffered even greater extremes of boredom and insanity with this book but managed to get to the end and confirm the suspicion that it was never going anywhere. With that, I was liberated from seeing this awful text through to its conclusion. I rarely put books aside unfinished. I'll happily make an exception for this one. There are lots of things I could say about its enthrallment to wealthy white east coast folk and its fetishization of the objects in their homes, its derivative themes and style (you're better off with Dickens) and its modes of caricature. But what really pisses me off is that this is very bad writing.
