Minority report: last words on The Goldfinch

OK I'm moving on, giving up on Donna Tartt's gargantuan The Goldfinch as it's been a true disappointment and has done nothing to move me, inspire me, or in fact hold my interest. I took a look yesterday at a few reviews (I rarely read them, other than cursorily, before reading a novel) and was surprised at Michiko Kakutani's rave - I usually agree with her and I know she's never swayed by publicity or hype or anticipation - so maybe there's something I've missed entirely. MK rightly notes that the eponymous goldfinch is no more than a McGuffin - for those who don't know, that's a term Hitchcock devised for a plot element, often a physical object like a suitcase, that sets the story in motion but is in and of itself not terribly important. That may be true, but for me it's not enough in that I had no interest in the meandering and to my mind poorly narrated account of this 13-year-olds life following the terrorist bombing that he survived but that killed his mother. I do wonder if the novel would have been stronger had Tartt not included the goldfinch painting at all - and also wonder whether she shoe-horned it into her story at a later stage. Probably would have been no better for me, and the goldfinch has proven to be a shrewd, iconic marketing device, so my thought is kind of absurd, but perhaps I felt too distracted by wondering about the painting he keeps schlepping around and not focused enough on what the story's really about - the "education" of a young man. As noted in my first post, many have and will compare this novel with Dickens, as especially when the narrator meets the young girl Pippa the echoes of Great Expectation are pretty loud - but again I think Tartt's style is not at all Dickensian - the characters feel flat and undistinguished, the narration is driven (slowly) by long expositions, and the status and social details are oddly generic. Enough already - I am in a small minority here and I hope many other readers will enjoy reading this novel and that Tartt will writer others.