Book Club Guide

The Goldfinch

by Donna Tartt · 2014 · Literary Fiction

Key themes

Art as survival and obsession
Grief that shapes an entire life
Crime, class and the American underworld

About this book

When a bomb destroys the museum where he is visiting, thirteen-year-old Theo Decker survives but his mother does not. In the chaos, he takes a small Dutch painting — The Goldfinch — which will haunt his life for the next decade and a half, through foster care, antiques, addiction and a criminal underworld. Tartt's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel is a meditation on art, loss and the things we carry.

Published in 2013, The Goldfinch won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2014, making Donna Tartt a two-time Pulitzer contender (The Secret History was nominated in 1993). It received among the most divided critical responses of any Pulitzer winner.

Discussion questions

Theo keeps the painting for years, and it becomes both his salvation and his crime. What does The Goldfinch (the painting) represent — and does it change over the course of the novel?
The novel is a bildungsroman that takes Theo from childhood grief through multiple forms of self-destruction. How does Tartt structure his moral education — and is the ending's philosophy earned or too neat?
Boris is one of contemporary fiction's most vivid supporting characters. What does the novel do with his friendship — is it ultimately redemptive or corrupting or both?
The novel is very long (700+ pages) and was both a Pulitzer winner and widely criticised as overwritten. How did you experience the length — as necessary or as excess?
The final pages offer an extended meditation on art, loss and meaning. How did you respond to this — as profound, as over-explained, or as something you needed the rest of the novel to earn?