Have any of you read it yet?
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.
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.”
“I learned pretty early on that I wasn’t cut out for sort of the public, literary....” she said, her voice trailing off, and her light green eyes darting to the side. “Too much noise, too much hubbub, too much.”
To her relief, the publicity subsided, and Ms. Tartt went back to her writing, rarely granting interviews or discussing her private life. (For the record, she is unmarried, has no children, and divides her time between Manhattan and the Virginia countryside.) Ten years after “The Secret History,” Ms. Tartt and her publisher, Knopf, released “The Little Friend,” a story set in the South that received much less enthusiastic reviews but still sold briskly.
She got back to work on a new novel that had its beginnings during trips to Amsterdam more than 20 years ago. Ms. Tartt is a lifelong keeper of notebooks, and some of the earliest scenes in “The Goldfinch” were taken from notes dated 1993. “I was writing for a while not knowing what I was writing,” she said. “That’s the way it’s been with all my books. Things will come to you and you’re not going to know exactly how they fit in. You have to trust in the way they all fit together, that your subconscious knows what you’re doing.”
The book was centered on a 1654 painting by the Dutch artist Carel Fabritius — the “Goldfinch” — that Ms. Tartt, speaking with the authority of an art historian, said is the “missing link” between Rembrandt and Vermeer.
