Just moments after she explains the composition of Rembrandt’s unnerving “ Anatomy Lesson,” Theo finds himself lying amid dozens of bodies flayed by a terrorist’s bomb.

“Things would have turned out better if she had lived,” Theo begins, and immediately we’re swept back to that calamitous spring day in New York when he and his mom darted into the Metropolitan Museum.

His only solace is a brief dream visit from his beloved mother, who died 14 years ago, when he was a mischievous eighth-grader. Theo Decker is rotting in a hotel room in Amsterdam, sweaty with fever and narcotics, afraid to leave or even call for help. She’s not writing an extension of “Great Expectations” such as Peter Carey’s marvelous “Jack Maggs.” Still, anyone who’s run through the streets of London with Pip and Estella will catch glimpses of those characters and others in “The Goldfinch.” And even if Tartt can’t write with Dickens’s speed, she knows how to create the same kind of intimate voice, laced with her own brand of mordant comedy and sorrow that makes us willing captives.Īlthough it opens on a Christmas Day, amid the festivities of the season, the story is framed by grief. There’s nothing slavish, though, about Tartt’s allusions to Dickens. You can hear the great master in everything from the endlessly propulsive plot to the description of a minor character with a “cleft chin, doughball nose, tense slit of a mouth, all bunched tight in the center of a face which glowed a plump, inflamed, blood-pressure pink.” Indeed, Charles Dickens floats through these pages like Marley’s ghost. While the world has been transformed over the past decade, one of the most remarkable qualities of “The Goldfinch” is that it arrives singed with 9/11 terror but redolent of a 19th-century novel. Tartt’s many fans have waited with great expectations since her previous book, “The Little Friend,” was published in 2002. She places Fabritius’s tiny bird at the center of a capacious story that soars across the United States and around the planet, lighting on themes of beauty, family and destiny. But Tartt’s novel is no delicate study of a girl with a pearl earring. Though he was a celebrated student of Rembrandt, the Dutch painter was almost blasted into obscurity by a gunpowder explosion in 1654, a fatal accident that made his few extant paintings even rarer than Vermeer’s.

Don’t worry if you can’t recall that name from a dark and somnolent art-history classroom. You’ll need lots of space for “The Goldfinch,” Donna Tartt’s giant new masterpiece about a small masterpiece by Carel Fabritius. Clear off the biggest wall in the gallery of novels about beloved paintings.

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