Many of the numbers weren’t clearly posted, and just as I was wondering if I’d missed it and ought to double back, I suddenly found myself looking at the words Hobart and Blackwell painted in a neat, old-fashioned arch upon the window of a shop. I was on a slightly shabby part of the street that was mainly residential. . . . The dying man tells the boy to go to “Hobart and Blackwell. . . . Ring the green bell.” These clues-and the ring!-eventually lead the boy to the premises of Hobart and Blackwell, where the door is answered by a charming man named James Hobart, or Hobie, for short: During the confused aftermath of the explosion, an old man, fatally wounded, hands the boy a heavy gold ring, and entrusts him with a priceless seventeenth-century painting. His mother has died in an awful explosion at a museum, and, because his alcoholic father is long estranged, the boy has become a near-orphan. In the first, a thirteen-year-old boy makes his way to a dusty antique shop in a big city. Its tone, language, and story belong to children’s literature. Her new novel, “The Goldfinch” (Little, Brown), is a virtual baby: it clutches and releases the most fantastical toys. Like the rest of us, Donna Tartt ages but her fiction is going the other way. Tartt has a considerable talent for magical misdirection.
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