For the past two months, I’ve been putting together an essay on the Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch.  The novel won the Pulitzer Prize and was also chosen by the New York Times as one the best books of the year. This is the first time I’ve chosen to devote my writing energies to the task of unraveling issues raised by a work of fiction, so certainly I was strongly affected by it.

If you outright loved the work, you may be disconcerted by my questioning a key psychological and philosophical underpinning of the novel. If you haven’t read the book,  I hope you’ll find enough description of it to be engaged by the argument I raise here.

If you’re a student of contemporary literature or psychology, I hope you’ll find the discussion useful, though of course you would be well advised not to cut and paste.

Yellow Bird – Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch