The narrator and hero of “The Goldfinch” is one Theo Decker, 13 when we first meet him, a smart New York scholarship kid who lives alone with his mother in a small Manhattan apartment. His heavy-drinking father, who abruptly left them (no money, no forwarding address), was always so unreliable that Theo developed a lasting fear that his mother might not come home from work: “Addition and subtraction were useful mainly insofar as they helped me track her movements (how many minutes till she left the office? How many minutes to walk from office to subway?).”
Then, one day, everything changes: Theo and his mother are at the Metropolitan Museum of Art to see an exhibition featuring one of her favorite paintings — “The Goldfinch” — when a terrorist bomb explodes. Theo’s mother is killed, and his life divides, forever, into a Before and After.
In the confusion of the bomb’s aftermath, Theo has a strange encounter with a delirious old man injured in the blast. The man, who turns out to be the uncle of a beautiful girl named Pippa, whom Theo glimpsed at the museum before the explosion, begs Theo to save “The Goldfinch” from the burning wreckage and gives him a ring, whispering the cryptic words: “Hobart and Blackwell. Ring the green bell.” Somehow, with these two mysterious objects in his possession, Theo stumbles out of the museum and into a new chapter in his life.
Soon, Theo is living on Park Avenue with the wealthy Barbours, the family of his school friend Andy, while serving a kind of apprenticeship to James Hobart, the former business partner of the dying man in the museum and an expert in antiques restoration who lives above his old curiosity shop in Greenwich Village. Although Theo initially intends to return the painting he has grabbed so impulsively, he finds it difficult to get it back to the museum unobtrusively, and he realizes that he’s developed a deep emotional attachment to the artwork, which he’s come to think of as a talisman of his beloved mother.
This sequence of events may sound highly improbable, but Ms. Tartt is adept at harnessing all the conventions of the Dickensian novel — including startling coincidences and sudden swerves of fortune — to lend Theo’s story a stark, folk-tale dimension as well as a visceral appreciation of the randomness of life and fate’s sometimes cruel sense of humor.
At the same time, the sudden reversals and comebacks in Theo’s life begin to signify something about the American dream itself: the promise of fresh starts and second acts, the continual possibility of reinvention. In much the same way, Theo’s peregrinations — which take him from WASP-y Upper East Side soirees to grungy drug haunts near Tompkins Square to the “oceanic, endless glare” of the western frontier — give us a window on the ever-shifting American landscape and its emotional dislocations.
No sooner have the Barbours and Hobart begun to provide Theo with the semblance of stability than his disreputable father, Larry, resurfaces, intent on asserting his parental rights and suspiciously keen on cleaning out his wife’s apartment. Larry appears to support himself and his girlfriend by gambling, and he quickly whisks Theo (who’s packed “The Goldfinch” painting in his suitcase) away to his McMansion in the Vegas desert.
Ms. Tartt captures “the hot mineral emptiness” of this neighborhood, full of empty houses in foreclosure, as deftly as she has conjured New York City. Indeed, she turns out to have a wonderfully adroit sense of place, evoking the anonymity and hive-mind flow of Midtown Manhattan in the rain (reminiscent of Eliot’s “Unreal City” in “The Waste Land”), the small-town rhythms of the Village and the neon theme-park thrum of the Vegas strip with equal acuity and élan.
It’s clear that Theo is suffering post-traumatic stress disorder from the museum bombing and is still sick with grief over the loss of his mother — feelings only heightened by being plunked down in the lonely Nevada desert. His salvation is a new best friend named Boris: a funny, profane, street-smart kid who grew up in Australia, Russia and Ukraine and who will play Artful Dodger to Theo’s Oliver Twist. The sly Boris is a memorable creation, a testament to Ms. Tartt’s ability to create people who have the sort of physicality and psychological depth that Saul Bellow’s characters possessed, a vitality and corporality that make the reader feel that they have a life beyond the page.
Even the supporting characters in “The Goldfinch” are a finely drawn lot: Theo’s mother, quick and birdlike in her starched shirts, a Kansas girl turned catalog model turned art history student, ardent in her knowledge of New York and protective of her only child; Pippa, the elfin, redheaded girl whom Theo regards as a fellow survivor (of the museum bomb blast) and a kind of soul mate; and Andy’s beautiful, gregarious and mysteriously detached sister, Kitsey, whom Theo will contemplate marrying as a way to ground his wayward life.
Theo and Boris will spend a lot of time drinking and getting high in Vegas, but with different motives. As Boris later puts it: “I was trying to have fun and be happy. You wanted to be dead. It’s different.” In fact, Theo’s lingering trauma over the loss of his mother and his angst about something terrible that has happened to his father have led him to develop a serious addiction to opiates.
After his return to New York, Theo joins Hobart’s antiques business and tries to stabilize his life. It’s not long, however, before he finds himself in an increasingly precarious position: a customer threatens to expose the store for passing off fakes as rare and expensive antiques, and investigations into the disappearance of “The Goldfinch” painting have heated up: there are even mystifying suggestions that it is being used as collateral in international drug deals.
Ms. Tartt recounts these developments with complete authority and narrative verve, injecting even the most unlikely ones with a sense of inevitability while orchestrating a snowballing series of events that will grow ever more dangerous as Theo becomes involved with violent criminals who covet “The Goldfinch” as much as he does. But it’s not just narrative suspense that drives this book; it’s Theo and Boris, the stars of this enthralling novel, who will assume seats in the great pantheon of classic buddy acts (alongside Laurel and Hardy, Vladimir and Estragon, and Pynchon’s Mason and Dixon), taking up permanent residence in the reader’s mind.

I really liked the book 80% through it.   Then it became very far fetched.