I’ll tell you where… at Petco.

I had gone there–sans my own pets–to fill our dogs’ pantry before rushing off to do my regular grocery shopping.

I’d spied some designer biscuits that smelled like lemon cookies and, being a loving and concerned mom, was reading the label when I heard a woman’s voice.

“Romeo! Romeo, stop that! Don’t pull!” came from the next aisle along with the kind of shuffling sounds boys playing at hand-to-hand combat make, and before I knew it, a brindled Italian Mastiff the size of a bumper car charged around the corner and burst into my aisle–his owner in tow as if schussing down a hill on skis–and promptly made me the object of his affection.

His aim was true. He bowled me over–along with the display of gourmet cookies. My lemon scented biscuits went flying, but Romeo managed to gobble up a fair number of them before his owner, a petite brunette, pulled herself closer, like a losing combatant in a game of tug of war.

“Romeo! Oh, Romeo, you bad! Tsk!”  Romeo didn’t care one whit about the reprimand, though. He washed my face and stood on my foot as I struggled to stand, and covered me and my clothing with slobber and biscuit bits while rendering the floor as slippery as a skating rink with the excess.

His mom pulled a towel out of her pocket with all the authority of a bullfighter calling a bull and began to swipe at his jowls. A store employee appeared with a mop while another began to pick up the biscuits and right the display table.

“You’re so bad!” She glanced at me. “I’m sorry. He’s still a puppy,” she said, wincing an embarrassed smile and shaking out her soggy towel. I was glad she didn’t offer it  to me.

“Just you wait until daddy gets here,” she said in that tone all mothers use to imply that dad’s going to do the dirty work of disciplining, but Romeo just wagged, his brown eyes wide, mouth panting, his licking tongue reaching well past his nose, tossing more slobber and crumbs everywhere.

And just when I thought It couldn’t get any worse, daddy appeared… with Juliet.

I jumped out of the way of the two Colossuses… or is it Colossi? Anyway, the table went flying again as Juliet swung a paw the size of a catcher’s mitt at her brother. I assume Romeo was her brother. I didn’t hang around to ask.

Instead, I went home to change my sodden duds, noting my husband’s astonished expression at my disarray, while muttering about how Romeo and Juliet had used me as a stage prop for their play.

I have mentioned that I am not a lover of literary fiction, so it should come as no surprise that I did not appreciate Donna Tartt’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel, The Goldfinch. I bought and read it, no doubt enticed–as I am by most literary novels–by the wonderful writing style and the novel’s length. I love the intricacies of plot and characterization that lengthy fiction works promise to deliver. But here–while some who have praised the novel call its extensive narrative passages symbolic echoes–I see only protracted examples of navel gazing, clichés, and mind-numbing repetition.

In 784 pages, The Goldfinch is the story of 13 year old Theo Decker, his formative years to adulthood and his descent into a spiritual morass of loss and drug use as a result of the inciting event: a bomb explosion in the Metropolitan Museum of Art that kills Theo’s beloved mother, among others. One of few to escape the area of the explosion, Theo takes with him the small 17^th century Carel Fabritius masterpiece entitled The Goldfinch. He’s not a thief. He’d been comforting a badly wounded man at the explosion site, and promises to save the painting the old man presses on him before he dies.

We follow Theo for the next 14 years—through his short-lived residence with a school chum and his wealthy, dysfunctional family, to live with his alcohol and drug dependent father in Las Vegas, where Theo meets a Russian teen who becomes his drinking buddy and partner in drug experimentation.

When his father dies, Theo goes back to New York, taking the painting, which he never surrenders to either the authorities or the person the dying man in the museum told him to. But he does take up residence with that man, whose name is Hobie, a furniture restorer and friend of the old man who’d died in the museum blast. Hobie pretty much becomes Theo’s surrogate father. They care for each other deeply, though due to the boy’s secretive nature (about both the painting and his drug use) and Hobie’s naivety and deep interest in his work, a bond of truth–the soul-baring kind offered up in Confession–is never established.

The story is populated by a host of eccentric characters, from Boris, the Russian teen who grows to become an international player who lives by his wits, mostly just under the radar of the international police; to Theo’s dad (and his girlfriend); to Pippa, Theo’s lifelong crush, who’s just as emotionally damaged and drug dependent as he is. There are a myriad other lowlifes, preppy losers, recluses, and con men, and many of them want the painting for their own nefarious reasons.

When I first thought about reviewing The Goldfinch, I doubted myself and my opinion. After all, no Pulitzer Prize winner am I. But I’m not alone. There are some doubtful reviewers out there, easily searchable, including Evgenia Peretz in a July 2014 article in Vanity Fair, where she explores the novel’s reviews as a preamble to her main topic: What makes a work literature and who gets to decide.

Read Ms. Peretz’s article for her thoughtful and sometimes humorous view of the literature scene. I enjoyed it greatly, much more, I’m sorry to say, than The Goldfinch.