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One of my favorite Five Golden Things pods from last fall was recording a “top five big books” episode with Tony. (We only got about halfway through our respective lists, because hey, big books take more time to talk about than little books. It’s physics.) Still, what a blast to nerd out on immersive reads. 

For whenever Tony and I record the second part of our epic two-fer, I now have a conundrum: I’ve recently finished another large novel that might well shake up my top five—Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch. It’s a book that’s a) big, and b) really good.

The Goldfinch released in 2013 to great acclaim—Pulitzer Prize, anyone?—and my friend Jeremy in Texas has been nudging me to read it since then. I first met Donna Tartt, however, way back in high school, when her debut novel, The Secret History, was traded among my friends. History was a bullseye novel for my crew at the time, as it depicted the agonies and ecstasies of a closeknit circle of college students at a small, liberal arts school. (Kind of like a Dead Poets Society but set in university and substituting Southern Gothic in for New England leafiness.) Secret History had ¡intrigue! ¡Late night, over-important philosophical conversations! ¡Trysts! ¡Betrayals! ¡Deaths (literal)! ¡Rebirths (figurative)! My buddies and I couldn’t wait to arrive into our own college experiences that would be every bit as dramatic and juicy.

[Narrator voice: “Their college experiences were not nearly as dramatic and juicy.”]

Since Secret History, Tartt has only written two novels since, both very large. (A potential corollary to writing big books is that they take quite a long time to produce—unless one writes within the science fiction genre, apparently.) Her next, The Little Friend never took off for me, which is what gave me some pause before diving into Goldfinch.

Jeremy, I was wrong! The Goldfinch is spectacular. It centers on a New York preteen named Theo who happens to be at the Met with his mother when a terrorist bomb explodes. The attack takes his mother’s life, but Theo survives along with the novel’s titular painting with which he absconds from the ruins. From there, over another 20 years, and between many locations from NYC to Las Vegas to Amsterdam, The Goldfinch is at once a coming of age story, a pulpy heist noir, and a rumination upon the value and persistence of beauty and love.

Like tons of other high schoolers, it was then that I encountered Keats' line, "Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all/Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.” Consider The Goldfinch to be asking the same question.

I have one excerpt this week from Goldfinch and another one for next. Today, here’s Theo towards the end of the novel (close to 800 pages, lots of harrowing ups and downs, etc.) wondering What It’s All About:
Life—whatever else it is—is short. That fate is cruel but maybe not random. That Nature (meaning Death) always wins but that doesn’t mean we have to bow and grovel to it. That maybe even if we’re not always so glad to be here, it’s our task to immerse ourselves anyway: wade straight through it, right through the cesspool, while keeping eyes and hearts open. And in the midst of our dying, as we rise from the organic and sink back ignominiously into the organic, it is a glory and a privilege to love what Death doesn’t touch. For if disaster and oblivion have followed [The Goldfinch] down through time—so too has love.

Donna Tartt, that’s an immortal line right there, “It is a glory and a privilege to love what Death doesn’t touch.” Amen.

I wish I lived like that more often, loving what Death can’t touch. I love, too, how the Christian story bolsters this very idea. At the end of the day, we discover in the Scriptures that Death can’t touch love and beauty because they’re created and sustained by the living Lord. In even better news, we discover in the Word something else that death can’t touch: Jesus, who yet died for us all.

With a resurrection behind me, I take courage to pursue loving what Death can’t touch. We all can.

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