Let us consider the problems of the long novel, in which the heft is apt to come in for almost as much critical examination as the content. There is, for instance, Jack Beattyâs famous critique of James A. Michenerâs âChesapeakeâ (865 pages): âMy best advice is donât read it; my second best is donât drop it on your foot.â Presumably, Beatty read it â or at least skimmed it â before offering these helpful hints, but you get the idea. In this hurry-scurry age, big books are viewed with suspicion, and sometimes disdain.  The book buyerâs suspicions are more justifiable. The critic, after all, is being paid to read. Consumers must spend their hard-earned cash for the same privilege. Then thereâs the question of time. Prospective buyers have every right to ask: âDo I really want to give two weeks of my reading life to this novel? Can it possibly be worth it when there are so many others â most a good deal shorter â clamoring for my attention?â  Last, consider the novelist â in this case Donna Tartt, whose first novel, âThe Secret History,â published in 1992, was greeted with critical hosannas and excellent sales. Her follow-up, âThe Little Friend,â was published 10 years later. This means she labored over âThe Goldfinch,â her latest novel, for at least as long. Such a prodigious investment of time and talent indicates an equally prodigious amount of ambition, but surely there must be periods of self-doubt. To write a novel this large and dense is equivalent to sailing from America to Ireland in a rowboat, a job both lonely and exhausting. Especially when there are storms. Suppose, the writer thinks (must think), this is all for nothing? What if Iâm failing and donât know it? What if I make the crossing and am greeted not with cheers but with indifference or even contempt?  Itâs my happy duty to tell you that in this case, all doubts and suspicions can be laid aside. âThe Goldfinchâ is a rarity that comes along perhaps half a dozen times per decade, a smartly written literary novel that connects with the heart as well as the mind. I read it with that mixture of terror and excitement I feel watching a pitcher carry a no-hitter into the late innings. You keep waiting for the wheels to fall off, but in the case of âThe Goldfinch,â they never do.  Like the best of Dickens (I will not be the last to make this comparison), the novel turns on mere happenstance â in this case, a heavy rainstorm in New York City. Theo Decker, our adolescent narrator, has been suspended from his school. He and his well-loved mother (âEverything came alive in her company; she cast a charmed theatrical lightâ) set off for a âconferenceâ with school officials but duck into the Metropolitan Museum of Art to get out of the weather. There is a terrorist bombing, and many people are killed. One is a woman with a spray-on tan and a blouse printed with FabergÃ© eggs: âHer skin had a healthy apricot glow even though the top of her head was missing.â Audrey Decker, Theoâs mother, is another casualty.  Of course, all this is an alternate history (or a secret history, if you prefer). No such bombing ever happened, and the painting that a dazed and frightened Theo spirits out of the wreckage â âThe Goldfinch,â made in 1654 by Carel Fabritius â was never stolen. It resides in the Royal Picture Gallery of The Hague. This in no way spoils Tarttâs charmed narrative, which follows 10 years of Theoâs adventures.  The first note is one of âRebeccaâ-like anxiety. The unnamed narrator of that book begins by saying, âLast night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.â Theo starts in a fashion so similar it could be an hommage (but probably isnât): âWhile I was still in Amsterdam, I dreamed about my mother for the first time in years.â He may not often dream of her, but Audrey Decker rarely leaves this 21st-century Oliver Twistâs mind. Surprisingly few novelists write well of grief, but Tartt â whose language is dense, allusive and so vivid itâs intoxicating â does it as well as it can be done. âI had fallen off the map,â Theo says. âThe disorientation of being in the wrong apartment, with the wrong family, . . . groggy and punch-drunk, weepy almost. . . . I kept thinking Iâve got to go home and then, for the millionth time, I canât.â  Theo washes up with the poshy-posh Park Avenue Barbour family instead of in the workhouse, and meets a kindly furniture restorer named James Hobart (âbut everyone calls me Hobieâ) â a Dickensian character if there ever was one â who will become a friend for life. He also re-encounters Pippa, a girl he observed with fascination at the Met just before the world exploded around him. She has been badly injured but will recover and, as in Browningâs âPippa Passes,â her periodic appearances in the narrative signal large changes.  Stephen Kingâs most recent novels are âJoylandâ and âDoctor Sleep.â
After a terrorist bomb explodes in an art museum, the young narrator of Donna Tarttâs new novel, âThe Goldfinch,â becomes the protector of a 17th-century painting.