The deadly allure of stolen art

Have you ever gazed at a famous painting in a museum and wanted to take it home?

That’s what inadvertently happens to young Theodore Decker in Donna Tartt’s third novel, The Goldfinch. The painting in question is a small one, completed in 1654 by Carel Fabritius, a pupil of Rembrandt’s. It depicts a small yellow goldfinch chained to its post, staring out at the viewer. One day, while 13-year-old Theo is spending an afternoon at MoMA (he’s actually in trouble at school for smoking, but his mom treats him to a museum visit anyway), a bomb goes off. Theo loses track of his mother in the smoke and confusion, but ends up holding a dying old man’s hand and, dazed, slipping the Fabritius painting into his knapsack. Even he can’t figure out why he takes it.

Thus begins a picaresque tale of Theo’s journey through New York’s Park Avenue homes, antique dealerships and Russian underworld circles. It’s a tale revolving around the stolen painting — which becomes both a talisman for the young man and a moral compass, a beacon of eternal beauty and truth that Theo’s sad, sprawling life can never quite fully match up to.

Donna Tartt has tackled art and the eternal before, in her debut novel The Secret History, which concerned a sinister Greek club at a small elite Vermont college. That book put her on the literary map, and earned her a generation of fans who saw shades of Salinger in her first-person narrators (usually male, though The Little Friend from 2002 focused on a young girl growing up in Mississippi).

The Secret History was also a tough act to follow, and her problematic second novel emerged only a decade later. This one comes another 13 years after, and with The Goldfinch, Tartt fully recovers her gift for broken narrators looking to improve their fortunes. After losing his mother in the museum blast, Theo finds himself adrift — for a while staying at the Park Avenue apartment of a school friend, then plucked up by an absentee dad who leads a sketchy lifestyle in Las Vegas. Along the way, and growing up practically guardian-free, Theo picks up a number of bad habits — besides smoking, there’s daily vodka intake encouraged by Boris, a young Russian schoolmate in Vegas, followed by various gateway drugs leading up to, and including, heroin. What keeps Theo somewhat dreamily thinking about attaining a better life, in the best Jay Gatsby tradition, is the physical existence of “The Goldfinch,” which he’s decided to hole away in a storage facility in New Jersey, entombed in masking tape and wrapping paper like a cocoon. Just gazing upon its colors and textures is enough to remind him of his mother’s gift to him: an appreciation for art and beauty.

Too much — too tempting — to have my hands on it and not look at it. Quickly I slid it out, and almost immediately its glow enveloped me, something almost musical… A power, a shine, came off it, a freshness like the morning light in my old bedroom in New York which was serene yet enlightening, a light that rendered everything sharp-edged and yet more tender and lovely than it actually was, and lovelier still because it was part of the past, and irretrievable.

Of course, this golden hue we cast upon beauty is also the same one we assign to the idealized past, or Fitzgerald’s “orgiastic future” that never quite comes into focus. Like The Secret History, Tartt’s 2013 novel is freighted with literary allusions and parallels. Theo’s journey — like the picaresque novels of Thackerary or Fielding, or the sprawling urban tales of Dickens — is of a man coming into maturity, though Theo’s is more of a prolonged adolescence.

Along the way, he conceals his love for a girl named Pippa — the redheaded niece of the old man whose hand Theo held in the bombed-out museum. As in Dickens or Jane Austen, lives never quite intersect in satisfactory ways in The Goldfinch — Pippa is sent off to a Swiss school, Theo is sent to Las Vegas to live with his dad; then he runs away to New York, leaving behind his best friend Boris. Like Dickens, there’s lots of room for random events to pluck up Theo and cast his fate here and there. Unlike Dickens or Austen though, there’s no great festive wedding to tie up all the loose ends in The Goldfinch.

Tartt here surpasses The Secret History in raising those questions — Why do we live? Why were we born? What good is art? What keeps us going in life? — and coming up with some credible answers. Her literary creations — Theo, Boris, and the antique dealer Hobie — are as vivid and engaging as any in Dickens. Theo stumbles through his own life, clueless, grasping for the things that always slip away, until he reaches an epiphany; Boris is a rakish Russian who never flinches before life, with all its horrors, and that’s his gift to Theo; Hobie is an older, avuncular figure, the missing moral compass that Theo’s been searching for.

Mostly, it’s just a sublime, entertaining read, a sprawling tale that takes us from Manhattan to Vegas to Amsterdam, uncovering worlds of experience that we can only imagine Tartt — with all her free time between novels — has diligently researched. We learn quite a bit about the antique business, the various characters and techniques and scams involved. We learn a lot about drugs and their deleterious effects (Theo being the prime victim). Most interestingly, we learn about where stolen art masterpieces often end up — used as collateral for big drug deals, because the pieces themselves are too well known to actually sell to someone for money.

Along the journey, the piece of art — the undying painting, its bird’s head confronting the viewer in a turned gaze — serves as the barometer of all that is right or wrong with the world. It holds up a light to the vicissitudes of Theo’s life, and the narrator, even in his drugged fog, regards the smuggled painting with a sense of purity.

I was different, but it wasn’t. And as the light flickered over it in bands, I had the queasy sense of my own life, in comparison, as a patternless and transient burst of energy, a fizz of biologic static just as random as the street lamps flashing past.

We hear a lot about stolen art these days, from Imelda’s crooked house servant selling off Monets, to great artworks stolen by the Nazis and hidden away in a Munich apartment for 60 years, to the relatively flat Hollywood take, Monuments Men.

Tartt’s masterful novel takes us deeper, exploring why people often covet art or hide it away from public view, and why it is indeed eternal. And here, the author generously allows us to inhabit a completely realized world, one way more ambitious and vivid than the snowy campus setting of The Secret History.