Donna Tartt Talks, a Bit, About ‘The Goldfinch’

Writer Brings in the World While She Keeps It at Bay

By JULIE BOSMAN -Published: October 20, 2013

Donna Tartt is the kind of writer who makes other writers, in the words of her fellow Southerner Scarlett O’Hara, pea green with envy.

Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times

Donna Tartt’s novel “The Goldfinch” is partly set in Manhattan.

She is so thoroughly well read that she is known to quote entire poems and passages from French novels at length in her slight Mississippi twang. In photos, she projects a ghostly mystery, her porcelain skin and black bob suggesting a cross between Anna Wintour and Oscar Wilde. And her self-confidence is so unshakable that it wouldn’t occur to her to fret that her novels, all three of them, only come out every decade or so.

Ms. Tartt, 49, is making a rare emergence from her writerly cocoon for the publication on Tuesday of “The Goldfinch,” perhaps the most anticipated book of the fall season, a 771-page bildungsroman that has been called dazzling, Dickensian and hypnotizing. She avoids most interviews and has zero desire to be a regular on the book-world circuit of panels, readings and award galas.

Arriving for lunch last week at a restaurant in Greenwich Village, Ms. Tartt shrugged off her tiny jacket and immediately lamented her discovery on the way over: the Barnes & Noble nearby had closed.

“I saw William S. Burroughs there once,” she said, sounding mournful, then jumped into a rat-a-tat history of the book business from before the Internet to the current age of e-books, recalling that when her first novel was published, it was typeset in the old-fashioned, pre-computerized way.

“It’s very weird,” she said. “The odd thing about it is that it’s so long between books for me that the publishing world changes completely every time I’m out, so it’s like I’ve never done it before.”

Ms. Tartt became an instant celebrity with the publication of “The Secret History,” her 1992 novel about a pack of murderous classics scholars at a private college in New England. The book has sold more than five million copies and has been translated into dozens of languages.

It was about two weeks before the publication of that novel that she became spooked by all the attention. The release was accompanied by a profile in Vanity Fair proclaiming that Ms. Tartt was “going to be famous very soon — conceivably the moment you read this.” 

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