Why Are Literary Critics Dismayed by Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch and Its Success? | Vanity Fair

Have you read The Goldfinch yet? Consider it the cocktail-party conversation starter of 2014, the new "are you watching Breaking Bad?" Eleven years in the making, 784 pages long, the book has re-ignited the cult of Donna Tartt, which began in 1992 with her sensational debut novel, The Secret History. When The Goldfinch came out, last fall, recipients of advance copies promptly showed off their galleys on Instagram, as if announcing the birth of a child. Her readings sold out instantly. New York's Frick Collection, which in October began exhibiting the painting for which the book was named, hadn't seen so much traffic in years. The novel is already on its way to becoming a movie, or a TV series, made by the producers of The Hunger Games. It's been on the New York Times best-seller list for seven months, sold a million and a half print and digital copies, and drawn a cornucopia of rave reviews, including one in the daily New York Times and another in the Sunday New York Times Book Review. In April it won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, the judges of which praised it as "a book that stimulates the mind and touches the heart".