Both novels depend on a sustained element of suspense as a Hitchcock film might. The two central characters both become involved in it having begun as innocent outsiders. In both books they encounter elite sections of American society, whether academic, aesthetic or simply wealthy. Their gradual progress into these worlds soon passes a point of no return. There is murder or violent death more than once as they both build towards a climax.
The charismatic tutor, Julian, in The Secret History is a similar older figure to Hobie in The Goldfinch, admired, influential and perhaps a surrogate father figure. In both groups of young people, drugs and chronic drinking habits are essential to their lives.
Donna Tartt is especially good at young people, their demotic mode of expression and specialist interests. They are uber cool in their decadent milieus and I was most gratified when in The Goldfinch, Pippa checks the contents of Theo's i-pod, the list is conveniently enough set at M so that Donna Tartt can nod to The Magnetic Fields, who are followed by Mazzy Star, Nico, Nirvana and Oscar Peterson but Arvo Part and Shostakovich are mentioned elsewhere. But this is a minor detail compared to the literary references and knowledge of painting and furniture that give the book an impressively learned authenticity.
If we have been allowing Thomas Hardy his plot twists, chance encounters and unlikely coincidences for well over a hundred years now then we can accept a few such necessary devices here, not least when Theo re-encounters Boris in New York.
Both books take time to reach their most dramatic final chapters but other themes build in the meantime, more perhaps in The Goldfinch where the story of the painting is apparently all but forgotten for several chapters. If The Secret History is more morality, a Lord of the Flies of contemporary delinquency, then The Goldfinch is ultimately concerned with 'the line of beauty', on themes of love and art and love of art and in the epigram to the last section, taken from Nietzsche,
We have art in order not to die from the truth.
But although superbly done throughout, there are a number of memorable passages built into the novel's large-scale structure. Theo's love for the unattainable Pippa is magificently expressed, including that,
the strange thing was: I knew that most people didn't see her as I did, if anything found her a bit odd-looking....
For some dumb reason I had always flattered myself that I was the only person in the world who really appreciated her...
that I was so haunted and stirred even by her plainness suggested - ominously- a love more binding than physical affection, some tar-pit of the soul where I might flop around and malinger for years.
And the apprehension of stark reality during withdrawal from drugs is very good, as,
The writhing loathsomeness of the biological order...And yet somehow people still kept fucking and breeding and popping out new fodder for the grave
But this disparaging view of humanity wasn't new to Theo. Earlier, when reluctant to take part in extra curricular activities at the liberal college he is sent to where one 'spindly twelve year old' student was 'rumoured to have an IQ of 260', he found the others,
earnest, well-meaning, undamaged, clueless.
And, as Theo and the Carel Fabritius masterpiece, as well as Pippa, are separated and then re-united across America and into Europe, the novel is a study of disconnection, a thriller of sorts and a love story. Both The Goldfinch and The Secret History head towards denouements that can't possibly be happily resolved.
And both end with extended codas as if Donna Tartt doesn't want to stop writing. In The Secret History it is an almost unnecessary aftermath, like footnotes so that you know how everybody went their separate ways. In The Goldfinch, a little bit self-consciously and not very satisfactorily, Theo draws some conclusions from his own narrative which he suddenly decides nobody is ever likely to read.
Life is catastrophe but one still needs to play it for what can be saved from it and from that can come a kind of joy.
Not all writers would recover from the massive success of a first novel like The Secret History but the genuine artist develops and improves and I'd have to say The Goldfinch is better.