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Eleven years is a long time to keep readers waiting, and longer still to keep them arguing. The remarkable thing about Donna Tartt's third novel is not that it sold over a million copies, won the Pulitzer, and landed her on lists of the most influential people alive, but that it managed all of this while splitting its audience straight down the middle. You come away from The Goldfinch either convinced you have read the closest thing the twenty-first century has produced to Dickens, or convinced you have been had. Having now spent a month inside its 771 pages, I find I belong, awkwardly, to both camps at once.

The premise is irresistible and faintly absurd, which turns out to be the book in miniature. Thirteen-year-old Theo Decker survives a terrorist bombing at the Metropolitan Museum that kills his mother; in the smoke and rubble a dying man presses him to take Carel Fabritius's small 1654 painting of a chained goldfinch. Theo walks out with it, and the canvas becomes his secret, his guilt, his talisman, and eventually his passage into a criminal underworld of forgers and fences. From there the novel sprawls: the chilly Park Avenue drawing rooms of the Barbours, the parched and sun-blasted desolation of the Las Vegas suburbs, the dusty back rooms of a downtown antiques restorer. Tartt renders all of it with a density of detail that makes each setting feel physically inhabited. You smell the city; you feel the Nevada emptiness press in. Her gift for atmosphere is genuine and never in doubt.

Nor is her gift for character. Theo is a convincing and often heartbreaking narrator, and the people orbiting him stay with you long after the plot's machinery fades. Hobie, the gentle giant of a furniture restorer, is one of the warmest figures in recent fiction. Boris, the feral, charming, morally elastic friend Theo acquires in Vegas, threatens at several points to walk off with the entire novel. These relationships are the book's true engine, and they generate real feeling. There are passages here of such absorbing intimacy that the experience of reading becomes something close to living alongside Theo, sharing every depressive spiral and reckless decision.

And yet the doubts are real, and they sharpen rather than fade as the pages accumulate. The plotting grows increasingly improbable, leaning on coincidence and convenient timing in ways that strain even a willing reader's patience. The much-praised length begins to feel less like ambition than like a failure to compress; long stretches could be trimmed without losing anything but their own weight. The prose, too, is unstable, swinging from genuinely lovely description into something more sentimental and overwrought, occasionally tipping into a register that does feel adolescent. The accusation that the book reads, in places, like superior young-adult fiction dressed up in literary clothing is not baseless, even if it is uncharitable.

The most damaging stretch is the last thirty pages, where Tartt abandons her story to deliver a direct sermon on art, beauty, and the redemptive power of great paintings. After hundreds of pages of trusting the reader to feel, she suddenly stops trusting them to think, and explains the meaning of everything as though we might have missed it. It is heavy-handed in a way the rest of the book, for all its flaws, is not. I kept hoping Theo's earnest aesthetic philosophizing might prove to be unreliable narration, some quiet irony Tartt was setting up to undercut. It is not. The sincerity is total, and the ending suffers for it.

Which leaves the question the book has provoked since it appeared: is it Dickensian achievement or overheated schlock? I think the framing is a trap, because The Goldfinch is plainly both. The great messy nineteenth-century novels it gets compared to were themselves baggy, coincidence-ridden, sometimes ridiculous, and stuffed with caricature alongside their brilliance. Tartt has written in that old, unfashionable mode, and to judge it by the standards of lean psychological realism is to fault it for refusing to be a different kind of book. It is by turns gorgeous and sloppy, profound and shallow, gripping and tedious, often within the same chapter.

What I can say is that it is alive in a way most carefully controlled novels are not. The flaws are conspicuous precisely because the ambition is enormous, and the emotional payoff, when it lands, is genuinely worth the slog. I would not call it perfect, or even particularly disciplined. I would call it unforgettable, which may be the more useful measure. You will argue with it. You may resent it. You will not, I suspect, shake it off.