A firecracker or a dud?: The Goldfinch

The plot is ticking along ever so slowly in Donna Tartt's The Goldfinch as we spend another 25 to 50 pages or so settling narrator Decker into his new living arrangement - the 13-year-old has no close relatives, now that mom is dead in terrorist attack, and the only people he can think of who might take him in is the very wealthy family of his one-time best friend -0 they're not really close any more - so that's where he goes and feels like a fifth wheel. Meanwhile, investigators come to his school to speak w. him about the terrorist attack - clearly, they just want to get info from him to help them reconstruct the crime scene, but he fears - quite rightly, this part does make sense - that they are probing him about the theft of one of the paintings, the eponymous goldfinch that he snatched from the museum wall. Of course we realize that he should just give it back - he will not be prosecuted or anything - but a 13-year-old with no adult supervision will not figure that out necessarily. This tension is the heart of the novel - but, unfortunately, Tartt just keeps meandering around, developing scenes at needlessly great length. She seems to have lost her capacity to create vivid characters - I so clearly remember the students and their odious classics teacher from her first novel, The Secret History - but I see none of that here: the schoolboys just seem generic; the adults, caricatures. Why is this? Tartt's sympathy is always with the kids, but TSH must have been closely based on her own experiences, her own friends from college, her own observations. She's now moved on another 20 years in life and doesn't seem as in touch with what kids look, think, act, believe - she's at one or even two removes from the characters she's trying to portray. I know this seems very harsh, and I wish I could like this novel more, and several readers have told me it grows on them and gets better, deeper, and I'm interested in how Tartt ties the two strands - the catastrophic event that sets the plot in motion and the man-on-the-run theme introduced in the first pages as a teaser - so I'll definitely keep going but, let's be honest, let's look beyond the hype and expectations, and figure out if this firecracker's a dud.