Donna Tartt’s “The Goldfinch” won the Pulitzer, sold 1.5 million copies and has been praised by everyone from the New York Times to Stephen King. But a Vanity Fair piece explores why it’s ruffled feathers in the literary world — a k a, “those who profess to be higher brows still than the New York Times.”
New Yorker critic James Wood said a day after Tartt won the Pulitzer that the book was “further proof of the infantilization of our literary culture: a world in which adults go around reading Harry Potter.”
The Paris Review’s editor Lorin Stein tells VF’s Evgenia Peretz, “Nowadays even the New York Times Book Review is afraid to say when a popular book is crap.”
And the New Republic’s Leon Wieseltier gives a backhanded compliment: “When I look at the fiction best seller list … mainly an inventory of junk, and I see a book like this riding high, I think it’s good news, even if it is not ‘The Ambassadors.’ ”
Then again, the piece points out, works now considered masterpieces by Dickens, Salinger, Nabokov and Fitzgerald were dismissed as “monotonous,” “absurd” and “inferior.”