The Secret History, by Donna Tartt
I want to give copies of this book to my friends; I want to teach it in my classes; I want to put little quotations from it everywhere. I have spent my entire adult life looking for a great novel set in the spooky halls of an old liberal-arts college -- Tam Lin bored me to tears, Waking the Moon was really kind of silly, and I've never enjoyed Robertson Davies' wooden writing style. Now that I've read The Secret History, my search is over and I can die happy.
In the short, frightening prologue to The Secret History, the reader learns that a group of friends at university has killed one of their number, a young man inexplicably named "Bunny," by pushing him off a ridge on a hiking path. The first half of the novel describes the events leading up to the murder, and the second half describes the aftermath. This structure is brilliant -- it makes every event throughout the first half of the book tense and menacing, even (or perhaps especially) when Bunny and his friends are enjoying themselves, and the second half is even grimmer as the world of the young criminals begins to disintegrate around them.
These friends are some of the most marvellous characters I've encountered in fiction. Attending a tiny, selective college in New England, they have become the exclusive students of a Greek professor who refuses to teach more than five people at a time -- and who, more disturbingly, refuses to let his students take classes with anyone else.
The narrator, Richard Papen, came to the college through an awkward series of circumstances that embarrass him profoundly, and which make him feel alienated among the general student population. He has taken a bit of Greek and would like to continue his studies, but the professor rebuffs him at first. This means that for a while, Richard (and the reader) only sees this Greek group from the outside: Henry, the arrogant, wealthy polyglot, and in some sense the 'leader' of the group; Francis, the Victorian-garbed dandy; Charles and Camilla, the delicate-featured twins; and Bunny, who is an anomaly right from the beginning, since he is loud, brash, coarse, and not especially bright.
The professor, Julian, eventually permits Richard to study Greek with him, which makes Richard a member of the group by definition, and which simultaneously shuts him off from the rest of the university. He is 'accepted' by Henry and his friends, in some sense -- he is invited to summer out at the country house with them, and soon they start getting drunk together and making in-jokes in Classical Greek -- but he swiftly realizes that they are keeping a myriad of secrets from him.
Of course I noticed things. I suppose, being around them as much as I was, it would have been impossible not to. But they were mostly quirks, discrepancies [...]. For instance: All five of them seeemed unusually accident-prone. They were always getting scratched by cats, or cutting themselves shaving, or stumbling over footstools in the dark -- reasonable explanations, certainly, but for sedentary people they had an odd excess of bruises and small wounds. There was also a strange preoccupation with the weather; strange, to me, because none of them seemed to be involved in activity which might be aided or impeded by weather of any sort. [Sometimes Henry] would punch around as frantically on the radio as a sea captain before a storm, searching for barometric readings, long-range forecasts, data of any sort. The news that the mercury was sinking would plunge him into a sudden, inexplicable gloom. I wondered what he would do when winter came; but by the first snowfall, the preoccupation had vanished, never to return.
Tartt is a master at keeping the reader just uninformed enough to feel uncomfortable; Richard is both insider and outsider, so his view of what is going on is privileged and yet veiled. Julian's students keep secrets -- sometimes from Richard, sometimes from Bunny, and plenty of times from each other -- and their own personal neuroses leave tracks across everything they say and do.
Bunny's presence, though the most annoying for the characters and the reader, is the most magical from a narrative perspective. Just about everything he says is stupid and embarrassing, and it is easy to despise him. But then you remember Tartt's prologue: that Bunny is going to die soon, that he is going to be killed by his own friends, and this makes him more poignant and pitiable with every ignorant thing he blurts out. He's the sort of person about whom you always say, "I want to kill that guy," but the reasons why anyone would actually kill him are unclear for much of the book. When it finally happens, though, it is utterly, utterly inevitable: the reader knows that there is literally no other way this story could have gone, which is the source of so much of the novel's tragedy and power.
I did not enjoy the second half of the novel quite as much as the first half, though I would be spoiling too much if I went into the reasons why. If I may be a bit Freudian for a moment, I'll say that the superego that kept the murderous id in check during the first half of the book has been stripped away once the murder happened; there are no masks any more, and the true bleakness of the crime (and of the whole world it happened in) is exposed. It's beautifully written but quite hard to stomach.
Tartt's control as a writer is almost surreally perfect. The pompous dialogues as students try to show off to one another; the details that a paranoid narrator notices as his suspicions grow; the winters in New England; the simpler, but also more honest, conversations that "ordinary" students have outside Julian's classes; the banalities of the press and of the university administration; the contradictions between lies and the consequences of idiotic mistakes... it is all combined into a brilliantly-paced, frightening, and profound narrative. I don't re-read books often, but for this one I will make an exception.
In the short, frightening prologue to The Secret History, the reader learns that a group of friends at university has killed one of their number, a young man inexplicably named "Bunny," by pushing him off a ridge on a hiking path. The first half of the novel describes the events leading up to the murder, and the second half describes the aftermath. This structure is brilliant -- it makes every event throughout the first half of the book tense and menacing, even (or perhaps especially) when Bunny and his friends are enjoying themselves, and the second half is even grimmer as the world of the young criminals begins to disintegrate around them.
These friends are some of the most marvellous characters I've encountered in fiction. Attending a tiny, selective college in New England, they have become the exclusive students of a Greek professor who refuses to teach more than five people at a time -- and who, more disturbingly, refuses to let his students take classes with anyone else.
The narrator, Richard Papen, came to the college through an awkward series of circumstances that embarrass him profoundly, and which make him feel alienated among the general student population. He has taken a bit of Greek and would like to continue his studies, but the professor rebuffs him at first. This means that for a while, Richard (and the reader) only sees this Greek group from the outside: Henry, the arrogant, wealthy polyglot, and in some sense the 'leader' of the group; Francis, the Victorian-garbed dandy; Charles and Camilla, the delicate-featured twins; and Bunny, who is an anomaly right from the beginning, since he is loud, brash, coarse, and not especially bright.
The professor, Julian, eventually permits Richard to study Greek with him, which makes Richard a member of the group by definition, and which simultaneously shuts him off from the rest of the university. He is 'accepted' by Henry and his friends, in some sense -- he is invited to summer out at the country house with them, and soon they start getting drunk together and making in-jokes in Classical Greek -- but he swiftly realizes that they are keeping a myriad of secrets from him.
Of course I noticed things. I suppose, being around them as much as I was, it would have been impossible not to. But they were mostly quirks, discrepancies [...]. For instance: All five of them seeemed unusually accident-prone. They were always getting scratched by cats, or cutting themselves shaving, or stumbling over footstools in the dark -- reasonable explanations, certainly, but for sedentary people they had an odd excess of bruises and small wounds. There was also a strange preoccupation with the weather; strange, to me, because none of them seemed to be involved in activity which might be aided or impeded by weather of any sort. [Sometimes Henry] would punch around as frantically on the radio as a sea captain before a storm, searching for barometric readings, long-range forecasts, data of any sort. The news that the mercury was sinking would plunge him into a sudden, inexplicable gloom. I wondered what he would do when winter came; but by the first snowfall, the preoccupation had vanished, never to return.
Tartt is a master at keeping the reader just uninformed enough to feel uncomfortable; Richard is both insider and outsider, so his view of what is going on is privileged and yet veiled. Julian's students keep secrets -- sometimes from Richard, sometimes from Bunny, and plenty of times from each other -- and their own personal neuroses leave tracks across everything they say and do.
Bunny's presence, though the most annoying for the characters and the reader, is the most magical from a narrative perspective. Just about everything he says is stupid and embarrassing, and it is easy to despise him. But then you remember Tartt's prologue: that Bunny is going to die soon, that he is going to be killed by his own friends, and this makes him more poignant and pitiable with every ignorant thing he blurts out. He's the sort of person about whom you always say, "I want to kill that guy," but the reasons why anyone would actually kill him are unclear for much of the book. When it finally happens, though, it is utterly, utterly inevitable: the reader knows that there is literally no other way this story could have gone, which is the source of so much of the novel's tragedy and power.
I did not enjoy the second half of the novel quite as much as the first half, though I would be spoiling too much if I went into the reasons why. If I may be a bit Freudian for a moment, I'll say that the superego that kept the murderous id in check during the first half of the book has been stripped away once the murder happened; there are no masks any more, and the true bleakness of the crime (and of the whole world it happened in) is exposed. It's beautifully written but quite hard to stomach.
Tartt's control as a writer is almost surreally perfect. The pompous dialogues as students try to show off to one another; the details that a paranoid narrator notices as his suspicions grow; the winters in New England; the simpler, but also more honest, conversations that "ordinary" students have outside Julian's classes; the banalities of the press and of the university administration; the contradictions between lies and the consequences of idiotic mistakes... it is all combined into a brilliantly-paced, frightening, and profound narrative. I don't re-read books often, but for this one I will make an exception.