Partly a coming-of-age novel, partly a thriller, partly a howl against the seeming meaninglessness of existence, partly a funny satire of upper-class frivolity, and wholly written like a dream, The Goldfinch is 771 pages of literary firepower. I thought of that last week after finishing Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch - an impressive, riveting, very readable, almost-Dickensian novel that might well be considered an all-time classic a century from now. These hyper-ambitious novels ask (and often answer) the big questions about life, death, love, family, friendship, art, religion, politics, violence, injustice, oppression, and more - while simultaneously offering lots of memorable characters and entertainment. Why? Those who feel the classic-novel days are finished might blame such things as anti-intellectualism (which became accentuated under the Reagan presidency of the 1980s), shorter attention spans (symbolized by MTV’s emergence in the ’80s), and the many media distractions of the digital age (which flowered starting in the 1990s with the Internet and in the 2000s with social media).īut amid the fun, shallow, and/or escapist novels published from the 1980s on (heck, there were fun, shallow, and/or escapist novels before that, too 🙂 ), there are also a number of jaw-dropping works in our modern era that are as good or nearly as good as literature’s long-ago masterpieces. Somerset Maugham), East of Eden (John Steinbeck), Invisible Man (Ralph Ellison), Doctor Zhivago (Boris Pasternak), One Hundred Years of Solitude (Gabriel Garcia Marquez), History (Elsa Morante), and other amazing works.
They lament that we no longer have sweeping, sprawling, often-lengthy classics like Moby-Dick (Herman Melville), War and Peace (Leo Tolstoy), Middlemarch (George Eliot), The Brothers Karamazov (Fyodor Dostoyevsky), Of Human Bondage (W. Are the days of very ambitious novels over? Some readers think so.
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