The Goldfinch: Second thoughts

OK 100 or so pages into Donna Tartt's 700+ blockbuster The Goldfinch leads to a few more observations some critics and reviewers have called Tartt "Dickensian" which, from what I've read so far, is ridiculous - they must think a Dickensian novel is a "long" novel - no, Dickensian means full of life and characters and quirky character details and sometimes sentimental and aligned with the sympathies of the outcast and impoverished and dependent too much at times on odd coincidence, which strangely serves to make the world seem very vast and very compact at the same time, much like London then and now. Tartt has I would say none of those qualities. But she is what I would call a maximalist - she loves to create a scene and then milk it for every detail, as we see from the 50 page account of the explosion at the Met museum in the first chapters of The Goldfinch - could this scene be told in 5 pages? Sure. Would even a lovingly careful and atmospheric writer - an Updike, say - want to do so in 20 pages. Yes. But Tartt won't go anything short of 50 - which could be OK of the wheels of the story were still turning, which they are not. The problem with this very weird scene is not that it doesn't contain rich detail but that the richness of the detail detracts from the design of the novel. What did Strunk say?: a sentence should have no unnecessary words, just as a machine has no unnecessary parts. So we go for page after page of the narrator  - reflecting back to a time when he was about 14, lives through a terrorist bombing, makes his way home, waits for his mother to return - and at last some sort of social services arrives at the door. But we knew this all along! We knew his mother died in the bombing, so why drag this out interminably? Damn, if ever a book needed a bold editor - but Tartt is a dramatic and persuasive writer, and it's hard if not impossible to mandate cuts to a writer of her earned stature - so sink or swim, and the Goldfinch is foundering here. I would also say that the narrator's behavior-reaction to the bombing seriously strains credulity unless we posit he's in serious post-traumatic shock. (Wouldn't any teenage boy get some help right away? Could the call-in # for people seeking news about missing persons possibly be so blunt and crude? Isn't there someone he could call for help - his mom has a very active work life and he has I would think friends and teachers at school - just to raise a few obvious questions.) Finally, the time scheme seems really odd, though maybe T will straighten it out - but obviously the Met bombing takes place in the near future - so the opening scene, with the narrator on the run in Amsterdam, must take place in about 2030?