Book reviews by Mobilism's Book Review team
Oct 2nd, 2014, 6:03 am
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TITLE: The Secret History
AUTHOR: Donna Tartt
GENRE: Literary Fiction
PUBLISHED: October 1992
RATING: ★★★★★
PURCHASE LINKS: Amazon.com
MOBILISM LINK: Mobilism

Description: Donna Tartt, winner of the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for her most recent novel, The Goldfinch, established herself as a major talent with The Secret History, which has become a contemporary classic.

Under the influence of their charismatic classics professor, a group of clever, eccentric misfits at an elite New England college discover a way of thinking and living that is a world away from the humdrum existence of their contemporaries. But when they go beyond the boundaries of normal morality their lives are changed profoundly and forever, and they discover how hard it can be to truly live and how easy it is to kill.

Review: The Secret History is often hailed as a modern classic - and is one novel I have read many times. In fact, I reread it for this review. Because Tartt's writing is fabulous and magnificently rich and descriptive, each new read brings with it new pleasures.

Before I begin, I must say: it is impossible to discuss the novel without first discussing the author. To me, Donna Tartt might actually be even more fascinating than her novels. In the flesh, she is a tiny person, enigmatic and ethereal, notoriously cagey regarding her personal life. She has published three novels, each eagerly anticipated, each taking ten years to write. In September, 1992, prior to the release of The Secret History, Vanity Fair ran an article on Tartt that has the most information I've ever read about her; subsequent articles I've found merely repeat a few of the article's key points. And even now, two decades after the release of The Secret History, Tartt remains as mysterious as ever, shunning interviews and any publicity except to coincide with a new book's release.

On its surface, The Secret History is a richly detailed but sometimes rambling psychological thriller that begins right away with the murder of one of the students, Bunny Corcoran. In its first few pages, we readers see a group of students push Bunny Corcoran off a cliff and into a ravine, so the mystery is not who did it, but why.

The story thereafter is told in flashbacks by Richard Papen, a scholarship student from limited means who attends the elite but fictional Hampden College college in Vermont (modeled after Tartt's alma mater, Bennington in Vermont). Almost too easily, he is accepted into a clique of five socially sophisticated students who study Classics with an equally, sophisticated professor. The Professor, Julian, is almost a deity to his students, but especially Richard, who looks up to him unreservedly. Julian demands that his small group of students not study with any other teacher and he isolates them completely from the rest of the college. Tartt introduces these five students...

    * Henry: The son of a wealthy and indulgent but distant father, brilliant, translates books into ancient Greek or Latin as a way to pass the time.
    Henry’s a perfectionist, I mean, really-really kind of inhuman — very brilliant, very erratic and enigmatic. He’s a stiff, cold person, Machiavellian, ascetic and he’s made himself what he is by sheer strength of will. His aspiration is to be this Platonic creature of pure rationality and that’s why he’s attracted to the Classics, and particularly to the Greeks — all those high, cold ideas of beauty and perfection.”

    * Charles and Camilla: Twins: Charles is a drunk, but is genial and approachable, Richard finds him easiest to talk to, he lives with his sister, Camilla. As the book progresses, Richard finds the twins are closer than most siblings.
    “He came up behind her and laid his hands on her shoulders; bending low, he put his lips close to the nape of her neck. “How about a kiss for your jailbird brother?” he said. She turned halfway, as if to touch her lips to his cheek but he slid a palm down her back and tipped her face up to his and kissed her full on the mouth—not a brotherly kiss, there was no mistaking it for that, but a long, slow, greedy kiss, messy and voluptuous. His bathrobe fell slightly open as his left hand sank from her chin to neck, collarbone, base of throat, his fingertips just inside the edge of her thin polka-dot shirt and trembling over the warm skin there.”

    Yet, in spite of this (or perhaps because of it), Richard becomes infatuated with Camilla from the moment he sees her.
    “Being the only female in what was basically a boys’ club must have been difficult for her. Miraculously, she didn’t compensate by becoming hard or quarrelsome. She was still a girl, a slight lovely girl who lay in bed and ate chocolates, a girl whose hair smelled like hyacinth and whose scarves fluttered jauntily in the breeze. But strange and marvelous as she was, a wisp of silk in a forest of black wool, she was not the fragile creature one would have her seem.”

    * Francis: Gay, wealthy son of a nervous teenage mother; has a trust fund
    "Angular and elegant, he was precariously thin, with nervous hands and a shrewd albino face and a short, fiery mop of the reddest hair I had ever seen. I thought (erroneously) that he dressed like Alfred Douglas, or the Comte de Montesquiou: beautiful starchy shirts with French cuffs; magnificent neckties; a black greatcoat that billowed behind him as he walked and made him look like a cross between a student prince and Jack the Ripper. Once, to my delight, I even saw him wearing pince-nez."

    * Bunny: the youngest of five brothers, raised in privilege, a happy-go-lucky type, loud, and sometimes thoughtless.
    "(Bunny) was a sloppy blond boy, rosy-cheeked and gum-chewing, with a relentlessly cheery demeanor and his fists thrust deep in the pockets of his knee-sprung trousers. He wore the same jacket every day, a shapeless brown tweed that was frayed at the elbows and short in the sleeves, and his sandy hair was parted on the left, so a long forelock fell over one bespectacled eye. Bunny Corcoran was his name, Bunny being somehow short for Edmund. His voice was loud and honking, and carried in the dining halls."
Interestingly enough, some of the events, or at least the characters, in The Secret History are rumored to be based on true life events and people at Bennington College when Tartt was a student there. I am thrilled to imagine that perhaps there is a real Henry out in the world, a real Charles and Camilla, a real Francis, a real Bunny (assuming they didn't really kill him off!) - but if there is, they have not yet been identified.

I must tell you: The Secret History is not an easy read, it is literary fiction. The novel is multi-layered and benefits from subsequent readings. There are Greek, Italian, French and Latin phrases in the novel, also many references to Greek and Roman history, mythology, and literature. Unless you are as brilliant as Tartt is, accept that you might feel stupid at least once while reading it. Because of this, I know many readers complain that her writing is pretentious, sometimes ridiculous, and that the average person cannot relate to any of her characters. Tartt deftly uses her formidable vocabulary and a dizzying array of knowledge of a variety of subjects to full effect in all her novels. To name just a few subjects she knows seemingly everything about: art, music, languages, mythology, religion, world events, other cultures. And yes, with perhaps the exception of Richard, the characters in The Secret History sometimes seem otherworldly. Yet, I have seen the close-knit secret literary society portrayed many times in other novels, most obviously in The Likeness by Tana French, in which I could easily identify each character with a corresponding one in The Secret History, and most recently in The Furies by Natalie Haynes, a modern day twist on the small literary society, this time at a high school.

I think it obvious by now that I adore The Secret History beyond all reason, but even I can admit it's not perfect. For example, Tartt has an odd sense mix of propriety and deviance when it comes to sex scenes. Incest and homosexuality are treated matter-of-factly, but she eschews all description of body parts, and all sex scenes take place off stage. One scene between Richard and Francis stated simply, "Things progressed." then skipped to the end. Also, even though the book is set in the mid 1980's, the students seem oddly old-fashioned, unaware of modern conveniences and are full of ennui, gliding through their lives in a cushion of wealth and privilege, indulging in food, drink, drugs, and new experiences indiscriminately, bored with the everyday and filled with malaise at the tediousness of quotidian life. Yet, I suppose among the idle rich, people like this did exist, and exist still. And yet have you ever met college students who talk like this? I haven't, but it seems Tartt did...
“It's a very Greek idea, and a very profound one. Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it. And what could be more terrifying and beautiful, to souls like the Greeks or our own, than to lose control completely? To throw off the chains of being for an instant, to shatter the accident of our mortal selves? Euripides speaks of the Maenads: head thrown I back, throat to the stars, "more like deer than human being." To be absolutely free! One is quite capable, of course, of working out these destructive passions in more vulgar and less efficient ways. But how glorious to release them in a single burst! To sing, to scream, to dance barefoot in the woods in the dead of night, with no more awareness of mortality than an animal! These are powerful mysteries. The bellowing of bulls. Springs of honey bubbling from the ground. If we are strong enough in our souls we can rip away the veil and look that naked, terrible beauty right in the face; let God consume us, devour us, unstring our bones. Then spit us out reborn.”

It would be impossible for me to give anything Tartt writes less than five stars, this book deserves more stars, were that score possible. Yes, the story is flawed in several ways, and like all her books, overly wordy - but all those minor complaints just do not matter. I love each character as dearly as if we all were old friends. And the writing! Every page - nearly each sentence - is full of spectacular imagery:
“And the nights, bigger than imagining: black and gusty and enormous, disordered and wild with stars.”

Five enormous stars.

Recommendation: If you would like to hear more the college and characters introduced in The Secret History, although his narrative style and talent is inferior to Tartt's, you may enjoy reading Bret Easton Ellis' dark and witty novel, The Rules of Attraction. While I am not much of a fan, either personally or professionally, it's fun to compare their different views. You see, Ellis, a longtime friend of Tartt's, published Less than Zero after his third year at Bennington, and became famous. Ellis' novel is centered on several students at an exclusive liberal arts college in the 1980's. Camden College (the setting of The Rules of Attraction) appears to be the same place as Hampden College (the setting of The Secret History). Both books seem to share some story lines and characters, as well as the mention of campus buildings. Several characters walk through both books: Ellis creates a character named Sean Bateman who has a brother named Patrick Bateman - who comes into his own in a later Ellis novel, American Psycho. Two other events that appear in both books: the suicide of a freshman girl, and Ellis repeatedly mentions a group of classics majors who "dress like undertakers" and are suspected of staging pagan rituals and slaying farmers in the countryside.". Surely these students are meant to be Richard and his five friends.
Oct 2nd, 2014, 6:03 am
Oct 3rd, 2014, 5:54 am
I've been debating over whether to read this for a while - but I think you've convinced me to definitely give it a go! Thank you!
Oct 3rd, 2014, 5:54 am
Online
Oct 3rd, 2014, 8:16 am
I read it not too long ago and thought it was a bit longer than necessary, but otherwise a great read.
Oct 3rd, 2014, 8:16 am
Oct 8th, 2014, 2:43 am
I've heard good things about this. Putting it on my TBR list. Also, this is one of the few comments I've ever made. I'm trying to get into a habit of posting and saying thanks, so there you go.
Oct 8th, 2014, 2:43 am
Oct 12th, 2014, 1:19 pm
Thanks for this review.
Oct 12th, 2014, 1:19 pm

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Oct 23rd, 2014, 4:40 am
I love this novel, and yes, it may feel a bit longish at some points, but it's the type of longish that is well worth reading. The words float before you, as surreal and ethereal as the writer herself, prodding you, tickling you, relentlessly dragging you along.

Sure it could be a few hundred words shorter, just the same as a bridge could be a few yards shorter, but then, it wouldn't be a bridge, and The Secret History wouldn't be the novel it is.

MsTigerLily said it best: The novel is multi-layered and benefits from subsequent readings. Read it, give it a few weeks or months to sink in, then read it again. You'll be glad.
Oct 23rd, 2014, 4:40 am
Nov 8th, 2014, 11:14 pm
This is one of my favorite books of all time, I've re-read it 2-3 times already and the plot still grabs me each time. Because I love this book so much, it got me interested in reading other Donna Tartt novels. While The Little Friend was lackluster, I thought The Goldfinch was quite a good...while it's not as intriguing as The Secret History, it's still a good read, highly recommend it!
Nov 8th, 2014, 11:14 pm
Nov 9th, 2014, 12:45 am
I like Tartt's books in the same exact order you stated!!! First: TSH. Then Goldfinch. Lastly TLF.

ccyippy wrote:This is one of my favorite books of all time, I've re-read it 2-3 times already and the plot still grabs me each time. Because I love this book so much, it got me interested in reading other Donna Tartt novels. While The Little Friend was lackluster, I thought The Goldfinch was quite a good...while it's not as intriguing as The Secret History, it's still a good read, highly recommend it!
Nov 9th, 2014, 12:45 am
Nov 16th, 2014, 3:23 pm
Thank you for the lovely and detailed review! I think I'm going to read this one next.
Nov 16th, 2014, 3:23 pm

"Am thinking of aurochs and angels, the secret of durable pigments, prophetic sonnets, the refuge of art. And this is the only immortality you and I may share, my Lolita."
May 28th, 2015, 4:21 am
I especially liked your little interesting titbit in your Recommendation. Nice!
May 28th, 2015, 4:21 am