A Literary Life

The Secret History (Donna Tartt)

True to my word, I tackled something a little less formidable this go ’round. After spending more than two weeks on John’s Wife, it was a pleasure to read 100 pages of this novel in one day and finish it up in four. I can always tell when a book is truly addicting when my eyes begin to skip ahead without me realizing it. I actually wind up processing something along the lines of “Henry… gardening in his blue… stoic eyes” until it hits the dialog, which is the meat of those dramatic, tense and word-skipping moments anyway.

Rather a shame though, especially to a word smith like myself, to miss out on those juicy, portentous little words. It makes me sad to think of so many gems of meaning being flushed down the drain of my head in my pursuit of the almighty plot. However, this a book where plot is king–a king snake with hidden coils, lurking danger and venom.

Enter our main character, Richard, a Californian on the run from an apathetic life and unsupportive, downright neglectful I suppose, parents. He runs to the east, to a small college in Vermont. East, where all of us Western kids think the truly educated, the truly civilized live and learn, where flip flops are distasteful and there’s no white after Labor Day and trust funds are plucked from the sky like apples off of trees–droopy and moist east coast trees. In this line, Richard becomes a scholar of ancient Greek, a devotee of the school’s eccentric and inspiring Greek professor and the five other students of the major, a tight-knight group of just the sort Richard imagines. A boy and girl set of twins, ethereally blond and orphans. A towering scholar with a distant demeanor and a flair for languages. A well-dressed and gay redhead. A formerly athletic but rather dopey fellow from a respectable family, respectable but no longer rich.

As Richard descends into the Bacchanal of his studies and his friends–and they are so magnetic, primal, purely emotional–Tartt does an excellent job of pulling the reader along with him. We all feel that we want these characters, so ideal that they could be carved of marble, to like us, to accept us, to continue to drink, take meandering walks, smoke and ramble off poetic quotes in several dead languages with us. Therefore it is the reader as well who feels the world begin to unravel beneath the deluded feet of our narrator.

After all, no human is carved of marble. No human can ever live up to what an innocent or gullible person can build up in their minds. Somehow, Bacchanals always go bad, don’t they? They may tap into the primitive soul and make us throw off the shackles of society, of self consciousness, of thought. Bring on the emotion, the passion, the instinct. But these ancient rituals also bring out the animal in us, quite intentionally. As Richard learns, his friends have brought home their study of ancient Greek to the woods, where they attempt the ritual, where they frolic with Dionysus and–whoops–accidentally kill a man who happens by. Their memories are foggy, they weren’t themselves. Oh, they have excuses. But sometimes an animal unleashed just cannot be recaptured.

In the prim and proper environment of an eastern school, Tartt brings up issues of humanity, morality, of the modern versus the ancient, about murder begetting murder and sin begetting sin, about the things we hide and the things we can never again hide from ourselves.

Okay, there was the glowing and positive section of my review of this book, a book I really enjoyed. Honest. Now (take a deep breath), let me tell you why this book isn’t deserving of a five rating. Well, there is that whole thing about the plot overtaking the words and I don’t think it is just me as a reader who will see it. The words are a vehicle for revealing a known end, which to me is different than the words drifting into an inevitable end, each a brick in the wall, serving a purpose. None superfluous and all essential. Not a large flaw, really. After all, I wouldn’t label the story as not character-driven in any way. The characters are vibrant, original and anything but flat. But it is the plot (X happened, Y was foreshadowed, and oh-quick-turn-the-page-to-see how Z turns out!) that reigns supreme.

And on another note, I got very frustrated about exactly what year this little drama is unfolding in. The characters’ fashions, opinions and mannerisms are so early to mid-20th Century. Then, at one point they mention that those characters who don’t watch television had been unaware that a man landed on the moon. Then, you hear talk of all these hippies on campus. But the hippies have access to meth, which is a rather recent thing, yes? I was rather confused. My mental image jumped from a very Dead Poet’s Society age to the 80’s and cocaine, back to the twin-setted girls of the 50’s. Again, it’s not a huge failing, but it did bug the heck out of me.

In the end, The Secret History was exactly what I needed after a meaning-heavy, thick with consequence book like John’s Wife. One I could read in the bath, at the gym. One that I wanted to read everywhere. A good ride for any reader to enjoy, complete with jolts of adrenaline in the exciting climaxes and bouts of nausea at the depravity of human kind.

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars - Book club selection

Fiction |