On the final page of Tartt’s book, Theo informs us, “Whatever teaches us to talk to ourselves is important: whatever teaches us to sing ourselves out of despair.
The two novels end with loudly redemptive messages. As the Nazis closed in on the city, Marie-Laure and her father, who worked at the museum, fled with the gem to Saint-Malo. In “All the Light We Cannot See,” Marie-Laure LeBlanc, sixteen years old and blind, ends up as the surviving guardian of a hundred-and-thirty-three-carat diamond known as the Sea of Flames, which once sat in a vault in the Museum of Natural History in Paris. In “ The Goldfinch,” the object is an exquisite seventeenth-century painting, which thirteen-year-old Theo Decker has stolen from the Metropolitan Museum. In both books, the teen-ager possesses a rare object that has been removed from a great museum the subsequent adventures of the object are inextricable from the adventures of the protagonist. A curious coincidence, of the kind favored by certain novelists, occurred in 20, when both the Pulitzer Prize for fiction and the Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction were awarded in consecutive years to Donna Tartt, for “ The Goldfinch,” and Anthony Doerr, for “ All the Light We Cannot See.” These novels, enormous best-sellers, are essentially children’s tales for grownups, and feature teen-age protagonists.
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