The Secret History (Vintage Contemporaries)

Greek Tragedy meets Comedy of Manners
Greek Tragedy meets Comedy of Manners. Crime and Punishment meets The Great Gatsby. In Cold Blood (the movie, not the book) meets A Night at the Opera (the movie, not the album).Donna Tartt’s The Secret History is a novel of breathtaking ambition, mixing literary genres the way a chemist mixes unstable compounds—carefully, brilliantly, and with the occasional explosion.At its core, this is a Greek tragedy in tweed and cashmere: a tale of hubris, fate, and the long, echoing consequences of a single act. But it’s also a darkly comedic study in pretension and privilege, a Comedy of Manners set in a cloistered college where everyone seems to have a martini in one hand and a Euripides quote in the other.Tartt’s prose is crisp, ornate without being showy, and often chilling in its control. The narrator, Richard Papen, is a West Coast outsider seduced by an elite circle of classics students at a small Vermont college—a clique so rarefied they feel less like classmates and more like decadent aristocrats teleported in from a lost Fitzgerald novel. (Crime and Punishment meets The Great Gatsby, indeed—where moral rot hides beneath sophistication, and where beauty and lofty ideals walk hand-in-hand with Dyonisian violence.)The book operates on a slow burn, turning up the psychological temperature degree by degree. By the time blood is spilled, you feel complicit. Tartt isn’t writing a whodunit so much as a whydunit—and then a what-happens-to-everyone-after.Stylistically, the novel blends gothic dread with drawing-room wit. It’s In Cold Blood (the film, with its bleak detachment of rain shadows for tears) filtered through the off-kilter absurdity of A Night at the Opera—though in this case, Groucho’s anti-aristocratic quips are replaced by Bunny’s provocations.Beneath all this, The Secret History is a meditation on elitism—not just academic elitism, but the dangerous, intoxicating belief that intelligence, taste, and beauty can lift one above consequence. Tartt shows us how that illusion of detachment leads not to enlightenment, but to moral collapse.It’s a book that feels like a warning, a confession, and a dare. It reminds us that brilliance without grounding is just a more elegant kind of madness.

A treat to read (no spoilers)
I bought this for my book club because they didn’t have it in the library. I hadn’t heard anything about it, so I just picked it up and started reading when it arrived. I have to say, I haven’t enjoyed a book so much in a long time. Now that I’ve read other reviews, I can’t say that it should be a “modern classic” or anything, but it has many elements that makes it so you can’t wait to get home from work and pick it up again, especially if you’re already a big book worm.For example, especially as you are starting the book, you will wish you could meet the protagonist’s acquaintances in real life. The characters themselves are incredibly interesting, and even more so as there is so much mystery surrounding their enigmatic behavior. You will wish you could take classes the way they did, thinking deep, classical thoughts, a close-knit group sequestered in a garret filled with oriental rugs, roses, “the smell of bergamot, and black China tea, and a faint inky scent of camphor.” Donna Tartt, not incidentally, is possessed of a wonderful turn of phrase, which is at once precise, seemingly effortless, and (thankfully) never ostentatious. The book offers its readers the vicarious enjoyment of the finer things in life, including peeps into the lives of the American ‘upper class.’ If you have any background in the classics–philosophy, languages, literature–being privy to Tartt’s generous allusions will only further enrich your reading.The book is not perfect, of course. Its main failing is the weakness of the chain of events that drives the plot. Tartt badly needs the reader to believe that not only did Event A lead inextricably to Event B, but all along down the line to X, Y, and Z. The challenge is so great that of course there are questionable links. If you are someone who needs plot and character actions to be 100% credible, you’ll have a hard time with this one. Additionally, as other reviewers have pointed out, the students’ steady diet of alcohol, pills, and gross leftovers is unnecessary to the plot, hard to believe, and unpleasant to read about. More to the point, the storyline loses some of its tightness at the college’s winter break and more often toward the end of the novel, as Tartt tangents into superfluous events that are either irrelevant or too drawn-out.This book is worth reading even if you have no one to read it with you, but if at all feasible, have a friend read it as well. The Secret History was a perfect choice for my book club because there are so many topics for possible conversation. They can range from the praise and criticism that I just gave to speculation over the assignment of blame for the crimes committed by the protagonists to suggesting different directions the story could have taken at the end. If you have been missing the experience of really losing yourself in a book, this is the one you should pick up. Enjoy!

I didn’t read it myself but the recipient was happy with it.

Sad. Long. But definitely worth the invested time. For some reason, I couldn’t put this book down.Enjoy and reflect.