Donna Tartt's THE GOLDFINCH has GREAT EXPECTATIONS, how the tropes of one classic inspired another.
While greatly enjoying THE GOLDFINCH, I noticed more than a nod to Great Expectations. Tartt doesn't merely reinvent the familiar tropes of the classic but takes them in directions significant for our time. Like the painted goldfinch, the trompe l'oeil masterpiece of the story, this novel is both referential and its own entity. The fluff on the bird in the painting looks soft as real down but close-up is just brush strokes. Part of my pleasure in this novel was to be caught up in it, while noticing Tartt's sleight of hand. Both THE GOLDFINCH and GREAT EXPECTATIONS are narrated by young heroes trying to make sense of strange destinies in journals they assume no one will read. Both are resigned to diminished expectation, when fate takes a sudden turn. The orphaned Pip, though exposed to wealth, literature and culture, through the stagy Ms. Havisham, had resigned himself to an apprenticeship at the blacksmith's bench, when a mysterious benefactor gives him the moneyed l...