The edge of their seats
Lessons from Gilmore, Australia’s most marginal electorateDecember 2013 - January 2014
Arts & Letters
Donna Tartt’s ‘The Goldfinch’
Little, Brown; $32.99
Theo Decker is 13 when he survives a bomb attack that kills his mother. The pair are taking shelter from bad weather at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art when terrorists strike. The explosion occurs just after Theo’s mother has drawn his attention to her favourite painting, the Dutch master Carel Fabritius’ 1654 The Goldfinch. In the chaos after the explosion, Theo grabs the picture and flees. It shows a small pet bird tethered to a perch, which comes to serve as a haunting emblem in what follows.
In Fabritius’ day, the goldfinch was a popular cage bird. It was also obsessively painted, and came to symbolise endurance and suffering. With almost 800 pages before them, readers of Donna Tartt’s latest novel also need to have a touch of the obsessive. The Goldfinch is unashamedly dense with narrative detail. The novel chronicles the 14 years through which Theo drifts from New York to Las Vegas to Amsterdam, through the high and low lives of fine art restoration and drug addiction. A near-orphan, Theo has few allies in life save for a kindly furniture restorer, Hobie, a wayward best friend, Boris – a memorable Ukrainian by way of Australia and Russia – and a childhood love, Pippa. Despite some improbable scenarios, the novel is filled with sharp detail and piercing experiences from the feel of fine antique brocades between the fingers to the fugue state of a drug high.
Tartt made her name more than 20 years ago with The Secret History, a debut that showcased an unusual talent for cerebral and controlled prose combined with the taut pacing of genre fiction. Here she demonstrates this talent yet again: although Theo makes several attempts to restore the stolen painting to the museum, he cannot let go and is eventually led into a dark underworld of drug lords and gangsters.
Several reviewers have made comparisons with Dickens’ gripping serials and even JK Rowling’s tales of the boy-wizard Harry Potter (a similarity noted by one of the characters late in the novel), but it may be more apt to compare Tartt’s elaborate story to the must-see cable TV shows that currently constitute so much of our narrative diet. The Goldfinch brings the pleasure of a dense, immersive story from our small screens back to books, and provides readers ample excuse for an obsessive binge.
How to be a prime minister
The task ahead for Anthony Albanese in restoring the idea that governments should seek to make the country better
The future of the Liberal Party
Peter Dutton doesn’t just have a talent problem on his hands
Ghosts in the war machine
Does the military attract violent misanthropists, or are they forged in murky theatres of war?
The dream machine: The 59th Venice Biennale
Curator Cecilia Alemani’s long overdue Biennale overwhelmingly features female artists and champions indigenous voices and other minorities
Mission statement: Daniel Boyd’s ‘Treasure Island’
An AGNSW exhibition traces the development of the Indigenous artist’s idiosyncratic technique, which questions ideas of perception
Shades of grey: Kerstin Thompson Architects
The lauded Melbourne-based architectural firm showcase a rare ability to sensitively mediate between the old and the new
Fear as folk: ‘Men’
Writer/director Alex Garland’s latest film is an unsubtle but ambitious pastoral horror, mixing the Christian with the classical
‘Trust’
The American novelist Hernan Diaz audits the silence of great wealth in a story of four parts presented as novel, autobiography, memoir and diary
‘Irma Vep’
Olivier Assayas revisits his 1996 film in a delicious palindromic limited series, in which a frazzled director remakes his ‘Irma Vep’ film into a TV series
‘Trespasses’
The powerful debut novel from Irish author Louise Kennedy is a masterclass in emotional compression
‘An Exciting and Vivid Inner Life’
Alienations and fantasies of escape unify the stories in Australian author Paul Dalla Rosa’s debut collectionGhosts in the war machine
Does the military attract violent misanthropists, or are they forged in murky theatres of war?
A dog’s breakfast
Notes on John Hughes’s plagiarism scandal
App trap: ‘Chloe’
‘Sex Education’ writer Alice Seabright’s new psychological thriller probing social media leads this month’s streaming highlights
‘The Picasso Century’ at the NGV
The NGV’s exhibition offers a fascinating history of the avant-garde across the Spanish artist’s lifetime
