If you came seeking ornithological knowledge about the titular bird, you may click here.
I came by my copy of The Goldfinch dishonestly. I helped a friend carry some boxes at the bookstore she works at, and, in return, she said I could help myself to any galley copy left on the staff bookshelf. I recognized Donna Tartt’s name and thought, why does that sound familiar?, and took it home. Later I heard one of her co-workers was furious at the loss. I hadn’t even known it was one of the most anticipated releases of the year, it just sort of felt like a book that belonged in my home.
Later, I was texting with another friend who had received a galley copy for legitimate work reasons. We were talking about how much we loved it and she said, “It would be great to read a review by someone who has a real art history education.” “Yeah!” I texted back. Several days passed before I realized she was describing me.
The Goldfinch is the third book by Donna Tartt, a name I would later realize I recognized from Nicole’s Classic Trash article, links I had breezed past on my Twitter newsfeed about the return of a reclusive author, heated discussions about fantasy movie castings clogging up my Tumblr dashboard. She has the find of fevered fan base you only find around artists who don’t produce very much art. Loyal, defensive, and agitated, the long separation just makes them more intense.
I wanted to be that intense. I (secretly, quickly) purchased her other two books online and paid extra for the shipping. I didn’t have to wait the ten years between The Secret History and The Little Friend or the eleven years between The Little Friend and The Goldfinch. Soon, I comforted myself thinking soon no one would know that I hadn’t been part of the Donna Tartt Fan Club since the very beginning.
The Goldfinch is–let’s get this out of the way–one of the best books I’ve ever read. Certainly one of the best works of fiction, if we’re separating our love into categories; definitely one of the most fevered and intense love I’ve felt for a work of art in a long, long time. The Secret History was incredible, yes, and I loved every weird chilling word – for more on the chill of The Secret History you must read Sarah Nicole Prickett’s essay on Hazlitt here. But The Goldfinch is something altogether different for me. When I went back to re-read it for this article, I thought I would find I had been wrong; that the preciousness of the precocious child narrator would have morphed into something from a Jonathan Safran Foer novel, or that the unrequited loves would leave me cold. No. The second reading just made me more loyal, more defensive, more agitated. How could something so beautiful hurt this much?
Here’s Tartt describing her main character looking at the titular painting, Fabritius’ The Goldfinch (1654):
“…almost immediately its glow enveloped me, something almost musical, an internal sweetness that was inexplicable beyond a deep, blood-rocking harmony of rightness, the way your heart beat slow and sure when you were with a person you felt safe with and loved.”
Here’s Tartt on grief:
“I missed her so much I wanted to die: a hard, physical longing, like a craving for air underwater.”
I mean.
In some parallel version of New York, in some strange time (a reference to a DVD of Jet Li’s Unleashed, believe it or not, puts the opening action around the year 2005; a throwaway comment about the story happening fourteen years earlier makes the book’s present appear to be 2019, although another comment at the end of the book suggests that the climatic events happened several years earlier, so maybe 2016? The Secret History shares this tendency to feel both past and future), a right-wing domestic terrorist organization has planted a bomb at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. For a variety of inexplicable, all-too-fateful reasons, our narrator, Theo Decker, is at the Met with his mother on a rainy weekday morning. Theo is watching a girl, straining to find about more about her as she moves through the museum with an older man. After the bomb goes off, he has a strange interaction with the man, who begs him to take The Goldfinch painting away from the wreckage, presses a family ring into his palm, and then dies. His mother was in another room of the museum and also dies.
From there, The Goldfinch takes Theo through the home of a wealthy friend and his cold, but ultimately loving, parents; the antique shop where the old man worked and where he forms a bond with the remaining owner, Hobart (Hobie); meets the girl who caught his eye and falls totally, completely in love for life; to Las Vegas, where his failed actor and formerly mean drunk father wrenches him away, and where a friendship with an expat Russian either sets him on the course he was destined for or away from the life he was meant to have. The whole time, the painting remains the cloud over Theo’s head, as the parallel universe version of Interpol searches for what would be one of the greatest losses in the history of art.
The book is pure Dickens, through and through, like how Theo introduces himself to Hobie, the antiques dealer who comes to be his true father figure: “I’m Theo. Theodore Decker. Everybody calls me Theo. I live uptown.” When his friend Boris from Las Vegas, returning as an adult, finally meets Hobie, Hobie properly compares him to the Artful Dodger. The twists and turns of fate, the kind that lead Oliver Twist to the home he was always meant to have, make perfect sense in this parallel New York universe; after all, why wouldn’t an antiques dealer know or know of every rich white person in the city? The obsession with a girl out of his league, stolen away from him by an embittered female relative and than lesser male suitors, is pure Great Expectations – she’s even named Pippa, perhaps as homage to Dicken’s male narrator Pip.
Of course, being a Donna Tartt novel, it’s less Great Expectations by Charles Dickens than the Great Expectations movie adaptation starring Ethan Hawke and Gwyneth Paltrow (a terrible movie that I love beyond any reason) – all sly digs at the contemporary art world and Fifth Avenue collector culture. There are some references to iPhones and even Juicy Couture, but for the most part, the book hovers somewhere between a moderately distant past and an almost relatable present. What makes The Goldfinch feel like a longing for air underwater is the way Tartt writes so expertly about belonging, or more specifically, the experience of not belonging. (read more)
The Secret History was a story about an upwardly mobile teenager, Richard, ashamed of his humble origins and desperately trying to catch up with his cultured, educated, and possibly pure evil classmates. The book is all satire, pure undergrad lols: at one point, the leader of the group says this about a man’s death: “I mean, this man was not Voltaire.” It’s like Less Than Zero, the other satire about spoiled undergrads that came out of Bennington from Tartt’s classmate and friend Bret Easton Ellis (The Secret History is dedicated to him), but with stakes you actually give a shit about.
The Goldfinch, by contrast, feels completely sincere. It could have easily become a satire of antique collectors and contemporary con men, but instead, it’s a slow, thoughtful story that touches on concepts like beauty, art, ownership, family, and of course, being the perpetual outsider. Theo never really belongs anywhere: not on the Upper East Side, not as juvenile delinquent in the desert, not in his own relationships. His accidental theft of the painting keeps him guarded and paranoid, but it’s his intellectual insecurity and inferiority complexes that keeps him from truly seeing the kindness that’s been present his entire life.
A memory came back to me as I writing this: a tutorial for a political philosophy intro course, a course populated by beautiful white boys clothed in an endless parade of discreetly monogrammed wool sweaters. The TA, a big, handsome man who was kind with their endless monologues on Plato, once asked someone to define a stereotype. I raised my hand; the first and last time I would do so. “It’s a mental shortcut,” I said, softly but surely. He looked like I’d slapped him. “Yes,” he said, shocked that someone had given him the literal definition as opposed to a lecture on the nature and wrongness of stereotyping. “I’m sorry, are you studying logic? Or linguistics?” I shook my head. I had gotten the definition from a Psych 101 textbook but was too paralyzed to respond. Just those four words had taken everything I had out of me, the room felt smaller and I felt huge. But I was right. And I never forgot that feeling, the feeling of understanding what an academic was looking for and delivering exactly that.
I studied art history at the University of Toronto for about two years. I quit halfway through writing the first paper I had ever been truly excited about it: a comparison between Manet’s Olympia, one of my favourites, and the Vanessa Beecroft performance pieces of the time (I guess 2006 or 2007? My memory, like a character from a Donna Tartt novel, always feels unreliable.) The thesis was something about white bodies and black bodies, the way black women were used as props, the way our classroom lectures always focused on what Olympia’s defiant glare had to teach us but how there was somehow never time to talk about the black woman in the background of the painting holding the flowers from some john.
I found studying art history suffocating and exhilarating all at once. I loved it the way Theo’s mother is described loving her art history classes at NYU: “’pure bliss, perfect heaven,” she’d said, up to the neck in art books and poring over the same old slides (Manet, Vuillard) until her vision started to blur. (“It’s crazy,” she’d said, “but I’d be perfectly happy if I could sit looking at the same half dozen paintings for the rest of my life. I can’t think of a better way to go insane.”) Same.
But that’s not really what the study of art history is for. Art history degrees are meant to prepare you for a lifetime of categorizing, archiving, and dismissing, I found; the program was filled with two kinds of people, loud and quiet, but I never found someone else who wasn’t sure if Jansen really knew the complete history of art, or whether our contemporary classes were really trying to be as representative of the real diversity of artists working today as they claimed. Of course, I didn’t really try as hard as I could have to find them because I was too scared to say any of this in class.
I never really dropped out, just stopped enrolling for classes. I wasn’t like my classmates. I didn’t have the money to continue, couldn’t see the point or value, and was eager to start what I now realize will be a lifelong hustle to stay in front of my school debts. But that hustle has, like Theo, led me right into the same community I would have had if I had stayed at U of T; educated, well-dressed in expert knits, brains with a seemingly bottomless capacity for references and connections that I fear I can’t keep up with.
I’ve never read Great Expectations. Or Oliver Twist. Or, for that matter, Less than Zero. I never took a class that demanded I read them; I didn’t stay in school long enough to have a professor demand that I read them, or maybe take the right classes, who knows. Everything I know is gleaned from living amongst people who know better. I know the elements of pop culture so prevalent that you don’t have to really experience the work itself to understand the dominant theme or meaning. I know Oliver Twist features a plucky orphan and a too-good-to-be-true denouement, I know Great Expectations from that terrible 1998 adaptation I love. I know just enough to feel confident throwing words like ‘Dickensian’ around and trusting that I’ll be right, but it’s always there: the belief that I don’t know what I’m talking about, that I am not educated or cultured, that I don’t belong. I had to look up the definition for denouement before I could leave this paragraph to make sure I was correct.
To have no confidence in your own thoughts is to be lost inside your brain. There is no shortcut you can trust; the smallest slip will betray your own stupidity. You’re forced to travel round and round inside yourself, checking, double-checking, and hoping someone with a university degree says your thought first as a security blanket.
For people like me, The Goldfinch is a revelation. Towards the end of the book, when Hobie compares Boris to the Artful Dodger, he says this hopeful truth: “Well you know, Dickens doesn’t tell us what happened to the Dodger. Grew up to be a respectable businessman, who knows?” There’s still hope for all of us on the margins, half in love with art and intellectual posturing and half disgusted with it. On page 641, the fifth section of the book opens with this Nietszche quote: “We have art in order not to die from the truth.” But then again, from Hobie: “Isn’t the whole point of things – beautiful things – that they connect you to some larger beaty? Those first images that crack your heart wide open and you spend the rest of your life chasing, or trying to recapture, in one way or another?”
I will not quote the last paragraph of this book here, though by now I’ve gone back and reread it so many times it’s burned into my brain, even though I want you to know it, because I want you to go back and read it yourself. I want you to read every page so that at the end, you’ve earned that last paragraph, the paragraph that made my breath quicker, my heartbeats as loud as I’ve ever heard them, knowing that I was the person she described, knowing that in some ways we all are. The Goldfinch is a book I love, declaratively, with no caveats, no intellectual safety net. No one is born the person they’re destined to become; we do it to ourselves, we let it happen to us, with the objects that define us when they come our way. We have to seek art in order to not die from the truth.
Tags: art history, books, donna tartt, haley mlotek, reviews
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I was debating whether to buy this book or borrow it from the library, and now I know I have to buy it.
I’m on page 663 and all I want to do is go home and finish it. Seeing this review was as welcome as it was toyingly torturous! (thank you)
I read “The Secret History” about a month ago because I wanted to know what the fuss was about before delving into her newest novel. I hated it. It was tiresome and way too long. So now I’m wary of reading “The Goldfinch”… does anyone have reassurance?
Oh thank God somebody else hates it. My friends at university made me read it. They were all classics students so they really saw themselves in the characters and just. Guys. No.
I hated The Secret History, but the Goldfinch is just wonderful. I am only on page 300, but I can’t imagine what would have to happen in the novel for me to change my mind.
Ok I will check it out!
I also felt The Secret History was about 200 pages longer than it needed to be. I was told that it was filled with suspense, but the only suspense I felt was in waiting for the suspenseful part to start.
I also hated The Secret History, but I adored The Goldfinch.
Try Special Topics in Calamity Physics, perhaps. I’m told it’s a reworking, and it was excellent.
The Secret History is, for me, a bit like Alice Munroe: too much poking fun at real life to reflect unreal experience.
I DID NOT KNOW THAT!
Ha. I have a Goodreads discussion group (called The Rooster! – feel free to request to join, y’all – it’s focused around books we speculate will be in The Morning News’s Tournament of Books) and this week we’re doing a head-to-head discussion of Pessl’s & Tartt’s new books. Now I have a factoid to contribute, so thanks for that. I didn’t get very far into Special Topics before it was due back to the library and it didn’t compel me to continue, but I’m loving Night Film so far.
See, I loved Secret History but haaaaaated Special Topics. Mostly because it seemed like whenever the author wanted to use a simile/metaphor, and she couldn’t decide on which one to use, she just used all of them, in sequence. It got to the point where I was marking up my copy and underlining all the bad similes and then dividing that number by the number of pages in the chapter. It turned out to be about 4-5 similes per page.
Sorry to be late to the party (you’ve probably already read it by now)…but I found them to be very different. I’m still processing but I think I preferred The Goldfinch: it has more of an overall awe-inspiring effect. The Secret History is more pretentious, but the characters are intensely interesting.
Thank you for the review, though I agree more with James Wood, I understand how this book might be loved. I just wrote a very very long comment that got deleted, so will just say that it makes me so sad your program made you feel that “art history degrees are meant to prepare you for a lifetime of categorizing, archiving, and dismissing.” Art history provides tools for looking, visual literacy in a world that inundates us with images, forces us to look at works that aren’t immediately aesthetically arresting and allows us to look better at works that are. to quote a good friend of mine “not every art lover needs to be an art historian, of course, but we can’t deny that knowledge often increases passion and interest.”
Oh man. I DID NOT like this book. Or I didn’t like the 100 pages I read of it, which, since everyone else seemed to be completely enraptured from the get-go, I took to be enough of a trial period. It doesn’t help that it begins with my least favorite narrative device, the old “begin at some dramatic, inexplicable point in the future and then zoom back to explain how we got there”, or that it then goes on to base all of its pathos on the equally stale and horrible “unique beauty tragically dies” trope. But beyond all that, it just felt like walking through water. EDIT, for fuck’s sake. Get to the point. Or if you’re not going to get to the point, be less useless and dithering about it. I wish everyone would stop comparing it to Dickens. Dickens is long in a rich, complete, meandering way, not long because he can’t get up the energy to move on to the next plot point. Or because he’s busy admiring himself writing.
it really seems like she needed a few more years to edit it, but the publisher wanted the release to coincide with the Finch’s visit to the Frick. I also did not hugely like the book. neither did james wood. we are not alone.
I always trust James Wood (and you!) but I want to like this book because Haley loves it so much!
in fairness, most people Do like it, so there’s a good chance you will!! now go read it.
I feel like it’s in line with Jeanette Winterson’s work, where it’s more about words and language than it is about plot. Yes? No? Maybe so?
But at 784 pages, you have to be about the plot. At least a good bit. Discursive and winding and meandering and ziggy-zaggy, fine, but at least there is a point A, and a point Z, and a journey betwixt the two.
Ahhhh now you are scaring me off again, when the nice Toasties above said they liked it! Have you read “The Secret History”??
I haven’t. I read Little Friend and hated it in a similar way, but lots of people hate that book.
The way you’ve described The Goldfinch is how I would describe The Secret History… except I read the whole damn book because I kept thinking something amazing would happen. And it didn’t.
I hated Little Friend too. But I loved The Secret History. Now I don’t know what to do!
I feel exactly the same way, right down to only getting 100 pages into it. Too meandering, too precious… bleh. I gave up, and don’t regret it.
I completely hated it. Felt that it needed a brutal, brutal editor, and that nobody wants to be the person to edit Donna Tartt. There were beautiful passages, yes, but I just wanted to sit there with a Sharpie, crossing unnecessary bits off.
ornithological (sorry/notsorry)
Hahaha, I cut and pasted it and STILL managed to delete a letter.
Hey, if the Toast would like a copy editor on the cheap, I’m all yours!
As long as you suckers give it away for free in the comments, that position is prone to redundancies.
We do not want one.
This book. I LOVE THIS BOOK. I finished it a couple of weeks ago and now I feel like everything else I try to read just isn’t. I feel like this book blew me apart and then put me back together again. I cannot even say enough things about this book and its beauty and its trueness.
I am one of Those Donna Tartt People & make no bones about it. I came to Donna Tartt by way of a dude in a polo shirt at a fraternity book sale (an unlikely intervention, but one I am thankful for) & have treasured her ever since. I pre-ordered The Goldfinch like 8 months in advance and started reading it the second I took it out of the mailbox and it was perfect and I won’t shut up about it and Haley is exactly right about the last paragraph. That last paragraph is a piece of writing that I’ve turned to consistently in the last couple of months & know I will turn to again and again as I grow old and die and become a ghost that still won’t shut up about Donna Tartt.
Let us haunt libraries together, clutching at random people and whispering HENRY WINTER at them urgently.
Possible spoiler alert: Can we talk about Theo’s mom and the implied but never confirmed shenanigans she got up to? I can’t help thinking she isn’t quite as perfect and blameless as Theo sees her.
Okay, so I have a 13yo son, and I think he’d assume I’m basically perfect and blameless (if irritable and prone to nagging) – there’s not much filter there, you know? Theo lost his mom before he started to view adults as individuals rather than categories (parents, teachers, doormen, friend’s parents, random people working random places) which is why it’s so easy to shoplift at 13. You can be amazed at your own brio and know you’re transgressing, but the idea that you’re actually causing harm to another would require to you to put ‘shop guy’ or ‘owner of that big empty house’ into perspective as human beings.
(This tendency also makes it hard to pry any good gossip out of the 13yo. He isn’t paying attention to his friend’s parents except as gatekeepers.) (ALTHOUGH that’s the part of Theo at 13 that rang the most false to me, now that I think about it. Even allowing for the ‘single mother is best friends with her only child’ thing, Theo was SUPER AWARE of his mom’s co-worker’s personalities, jokes from the office, etc. Not just aware of them, but participating in that part of her world.) (Maybe I’m just bad at telling stories that make my kids interested in my life?) (Maybe my life isn’t interesting?)
SO. All this to say that I agree that she had a role to play in the dissolution of her marriage, as is generally true with divorces – though Dad was such an unredeemed jerk (and could he have BEEN any more unredeemed?) that even if Theo was self-aware enough to consider his mom from a more mature perspective (his lack of agency BUGS THE CRAP OUT OF ME) and think about her in relation to jobs and supervision and money management and whatever else, he might see her as less than a saint, but she’s always going to outshine Dad.
Oh, I thought it was spot-on that Theo deifies her, especially due to the tragic circumstances. I thought it was handled beautifully. I also thought Donna Tartt’s choices were fascinating. Just throwing out that “hey, this lawyer/banker/trust agent [whatever] guy really likes my mom. Like, really. Hmm.” and then never going back to that. I thought for a moment that’s the direction the book was going to take: shattering the delusions of a sainted mother. It’s dark, really dark but it’s Donna Tartt so, why not.
I am a Donna Tartt Person, too. Reread Secret History this summer just to quell some of my ‘Goldfinch isn’t out yet!’ jitters. Still wanted to hug it, though not as much as my 18yo wanted to hug it when I passed it on to him.
Goldfinch. Oh, Goldfinch. DAMN IT, GOLDFINCH, I HAD SUCH HOPES. And so many of them were realized! And it’s visceral, this pain I feel about the fact that I disliked parts of it so intensely. I’m not reading just for the gorgeous descriptions, the page or two of beautiful thoughts. If I’ve got 800 pages to ingest, they’d better have some damn good plot to to take me from beautiful thought to beautiful thought. Or a main character who ACTUALLY MAKES A DAMN DECISION ONCE IN A DAMN WHILE.
I griped further on my blog, so if you’ve finished and care why I am so mad at the ending, here: http://dakimel.blogspot.com/2013/11/my-secret-fee…
I AGREE WITH YOU SO VERY HARD. Except I got annoyed by the texting, too.
I loved loved loved loved this book, but damn I wished the female characters were just a hair more than symbols.
But to be fair everyone but Theo was really a symbol.
Ok, no I’m wrong, I think dakimel upthread has more accurate. Theo thinks of people in categories, which is, I think, why it’s surprising to him when people act in ways he doesn’t expect. He’s lacking in ability to empathize, to see beyond himself.
I can’t read this because I’m not done with it but The Secret History is, in my opinion, a perfect novel, possibly one of the only truly perfect novels to ever exist, and if you haven’t read it PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE read it and also will someone please talk with me about Camilla Macaulay oh my god
I AM APPARENTLY ALONE IN THINKING THIS NOVEL IS THE PERFECT NOVEL, I APOLOGIZE FOR MY TRANSGRESSIONS and my excessive commenting in this thread you guys I just love Donna Tartt so much (except for the Little Friend, of that novel we do not speak)
Don’t stop! I know I am unreasonable in my angst about The Goldfinch. And I do love it! So much of it! In part! I’m just furious that the plot had so many problems, ESPECIALLY at the end. Just ridiculous unnecessary problems, and she is such a gorgeous crafter of language and setter of moods and observer of place and culture and all of that amazing stuff but THE STORY IS WHAT BINDS ALL THE PRETTY WORDS TOGETHER, not the reflections on the nature of art and beauty and what is ephemeral in this world.
Secret History has that (boy does it ever) and wonderful characters and everything gorgeous in life. I mean, it was published the year I graduated w/ a MA in creative writing & I was consumed by a debilitating, painful jealousy at the perfection of that novel. (I still am. Whatever. I’m used to it now.) Anyway, don’t stop w/ The Goldfinch, it’s totally worthy, and probably I am just grumpy and wrong and bad at reading.
(The Little Friend – deep heavy sigh. You will like this more than The Little Friend.)
You are not alone! Donna Tartt is one of the few novelists, if not the only one, whose work I want to/do reread almost immediately after the first reading. And I reread the whole thing, which I also almost never do. The Secret History is perfect, and even when one of my fellow classics majors pointed out how she obviously doesn’t really know Greek that well, I couldn’t bring myself to care because that’s hardly the point, is it?
I love The Secret History too. I think I’ve reread it at least six times. I liked The Little Friend, but not nearly as much as The Secret History.
I think the argument that the book is really about the magic of liberal arts education (and not so much about evil or whatever) is right and that’s why it resonated so strongly with me. I went to a tiny, northeastern liberal arts college. I don’t think I’ve ever read a book that so perfectly captures the experience of being a young and impressionable person in a cloistered atmosphere, encountering brilliant teachers and big ideas. (Though my school was thankfully not as isolated nor as snooty as Hampden)
Sometimes when I’m bored, I’ll mentally cast The Secret History movie. Young Philip Seymour Hoffman would be Bunny and young Christian Bale would be Henry. Heath Ledger would have been Charles and (maybe) Michelle Williams would be Camilla. I’m undecided about who’d play Francis or Julian. Richard would have to be played by a largely unknown actor.
I did a dreamcast a couple of years ago! http://khaleesi.tumblr.com/tagged/dream-cast%3A-t… Though I think most of them are too old now (exception of Gary Oldman).
I actually did go to Bennington (which Tartt essentially just changed the name of to create Hampden), and so whenever I re-read Secret History I just end up casting actual people I knew there as the characters, despite my best intentions. It’s a little weird.
OH DEAR. I don’t know what to do with this, I have such contrary Donna Tartt feelings. I read The Secret History as a senior in high school, which is that perfect age when you are totally immersed in feeling special and unloved and brilliant and unappreciated and as such it fed into my inner teenage narcissist. But in revisiting it … I still love the language (the language!) but the novel seems full of absolute bores in their own little borish and entitled world.
And then The Little Friend. Which nearly smothered me with lovely language that didn’t GO anywhere. I tried to skip the end and read it backwards and even in the end it seemed like nothing went anywhere. I remember nothing of it except there was a girl and it was summer.
Perhaps the worst of it is, now, I work in a world adjacent to the UES art gallery world at soul sucking frame shop that fabricates frames for rich collectors and galleries. This job has given me little but disdain for the world of fine art and rich collectors. These are people who, in their own ways, are just as borishly self-involved and entitled as the people in The Secret History, except that I don’t get to identify with them this time; there is a line drawn in real life and I am on the other side.
But the language. God. The language. Donna Tartt can turn a sentence.
I am not yet distant enough from reading the book to really criticize it much, but I will say it was the first Big Novel in a long, long time that completely engrossed me and kept me up at night. After what feels like almost a year of reading very spare short stories (Salter, Proulx, Hempel) and trying yet failing to read novels (after four years of reading SO MANY NOVELS), it felt like being plunged into some kind of sensory overload. I couldn’t get enough.
Wonderful review. I just finished The Goldfinch and unequivocally loved it. The last paragraph is perfection.
Why was Welty so intent that Theo steal the picture?