The Goldfinch stands, in Theo’s mind, for his mother, for the terrible fact of her absence: it is the poignant symbol of irrecoverable loss and hurt. Photograph: Macall Polay/Allstar/Warner Bros

But the priceless painting, which Theo has secretly under wraps in a storage depot, throbs like a second, unexploded bomb, and he is destined to meet up again with grownup Boris (Aneurin Barnard).ĭesert idlers … Oakes Fegley and Finn Wolfhard. Poor Theo grows up to be a damaged and Vicodin-addicted adult (played by Ansel Elgort), who hides his hurt under a veneer of bogus sophistication having undergone a Ripleyesque reinvention as a smooth and crooked antiques dealer under the tutelage of kindly expert Hobie ( Jeffrey Wright), to whom the ring had led him. Theo is at first taken in by his friend’s elegant mother (a tremendous cameo from Nicole Kidman), but is then sent to live with his louche and grasping dad (Luke Wilson) in Las Vegas, where he befriends a Ukrainian kid, Boris (Finn Wolfhard). Among the chaos of cops, firefighters and paramedics, no one thinks to challenge him. Theo impulsively takes The Goldfinch off the wall and staggers out of the building with it in his bag.

As he groggily regains consciousness among the dust, rubble and bodies, a dying man whom Theo had initially noticed with a little girl is also still alive and, before expiring, entrusts him with a ring and gives him a place to deliver it. At this moment, a terrorist bomb rips through the museum building – a quasi-9/11 outrage without political motive that initiates a tragic chain of events. Oakes Fegley does well with the role of 13-year-old Theo Decker, the child of a broken home in New York who one day visits the city art museum with his mother they find themselves looking at Carel Fabritius’s 1654 painting The Goldfinch, the bird chained to the post, a poignant image of beauty and imprisonment.

The goldfinch novel book review