The novel opens as a 27-year-old Theodore Decker hides in an Amsterdam hotel room. He has been enduring “restless, shut up days” in the wake of a predicament that is unclear at the time (5). He sees his deceased mother in a dream, and the narrative moves back in time to her death, which occurs when Theo is 13 years old.

Theo and his mother, Audrey, live on the East Side of Manhattan, and Theo’s father, Larry, has recently left the family. Theo and Audrey are on their way to breakfast and then a meeting with the school. Theo has been getting into trouble, and this meeting is in response to his smoking in the schoolyard with Tom Cable. As a result, he has been suspended. They catch a cab, but Audrey gets carsick, and they decide to walk. When it starts to rain, they duck into the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

They look at the Dutch Masters’ exhibit, Portraiture and Nature Morte, “and the deeper we wandered, the stranger and more beautiful the pictures became” (23).

They examine The Anatomy Lesson and The Goldfinch. Theo notices and becomes fixated upon a young red-haired girl who is later introduced as