![]() ![]() There’s nothing slavish, though, about Tartt’s allusions to Dickens. You can hear the great master in everything from the endlessly propulsive plot to the description of a minor character with a “cleft chin, doughball nose, tense slit of a mouth, all bunched tight in the center of a face which glowed a plump, inflamed, blood-pressure pink.” Indeed, Charles Dickens floats through these pages like Marley’s ghost. While the world has been transformed over the past decade, one of the most remarkable qualities of “The Goldfinch” is that it arrives singed with 9/11 terror but redolent of a 19th-century novel. Tartt’s many fans have waited with great expectations since her previous book, “The Little Friend,” was published in 2002. She places Fabritius’s tiny bird at the center of a capacious story that soars across the United States and around the planet, lighting on themes of beauty, family and destiny. But Tartt’s novel is no delicate study of a girl with a pearl earring. Though he was a celebrated student of Rembrandt, the Dutch painter was almost blasted into obscurity by a gunpowder explosion in 1654, a fatal accident that made his few extant paintings even rarer than Vermeer’s. ![]() Don’t worry if you can’t recall that name from a dark and somnolent art-history classroom. You’ll need lots of space for “The Goldfinch,” Donna Tartt’s giant new masterpiece about a small masterpiece by Carel Fabritius. Clear off the biggest wall in the gallery of novels about beloved paintings. ![]()
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