A letter to Donna Tartt · The Goldfinch
Mergers and Acquisitions
A boy carries a small painting out of the wreckage and spends the rest of his life deciding what it cost him. On The Goldfinch, and the things we acquire instead of grieving.
There is a moment, in the smoke and the ringing silence, when Theo Decker picks up a painting the size of a hardcover book and walks out into the rest of his life. He does not decide to. That is the thing about the things we carry: we rarely decide. We acquire.
A novel about a stolen painting turns out to be a novel about inventory — about the running ledger we keep of what we own, what we owe, and what we have quietly written off. Tartt understands that grief is a kind of accounting, and that some debts you service for decades precisely because you cannot bear to settle them.
I read it the year I was selling almost everything I owned, and I have never been able to separate the book from that emptied apartment. That is what the great novels do — they merge with us, and afterward you cannot run the numbers of your own life without them.
Draft — S.E. to finalize.
S.E. Elkins buys books at Powell's Books. Support a living author — buy it new from an independent bookstore.