I am returned. I finally finished The Goldfinch ( and The Catcher In The Rye, though that was. A while ago ), and I'm... So so sad that it wasn't as good as I'd hoped. I gave it a 3/5 on Goodreads, though it's closer to a 3.8 I'd say.
It's just... The pacing, mostly. I like Donna's writing, I do; perhaps this time the vocabulary was a bit beyond my reach, but I also feel like the amount of technical vocabulary ( regarding carpenting/restoration/furniture, for the most part ), together with her tendency to heavily reference American culture, such as places, people, movies, TV shows, etc. ( which isn't a flaw, just something that flies over my head as a non-American reader who really can't be bothered to look up Every Single Name And Reference ) has made this a much more tedious read for me. The characterization, at least, is as good as ever, and she certainly has a way of setting the stage and building up atmosphere, both the physical space and the mood present in a scene. But again: the pacing. It's just far, far too slow and stretched out.
And it's a shame, because the slow pacing actually really worked in her favour in The Secret History, for me at least, but made the story drag on in The Goldfinch. I would have finished this far sooner if I could make myself get through certain parts of the book that were... Not full of nothing, but definitely very lacking much of interest. The enjoyment of the parts that I did like was dispersed between long stretches of parts I only had a passing interest in or tolerance to, and that diminished the reading experience overall. I also didn't like the ending a whole lot; the plot kind of fizzled out after a beat of genuine suspense and a bit of thrill, and it felt just a bit too tied up in a neat bow. I was genuinely expecting worse to happen, but things just kind of work out... And then the message at the end is a confusing mess of nihilism and optimism, even if I understood the gist of it.
Tacked on at the end, because I can't necessarily call this a flaw of the book, and it really is a stupid reason to have a bad reading experience, but: the premise on the back of the book felt just a bit misleading. And again, very likely my own fault, but I am very, very used to the blurb on the back describing about 10-15% of the book's plot, maybe 20% max. The blurb on the back of my copy describes... Kind of the entire plot? Not in detail, of course, it's very short, but it does go past that 20% mark to encompass what is essentially the entire book. And I'm, unfortunately, the kind of person where if I go in with any expectations or prior knowledge, it's going to influence my reading experience. What this manifested as was me constantly wondering so, what is the actual plot here? And that confusion around what I should expect the plot of the book to be lasted for the entire book and always hung over me. So. Very specific issue, I think.
