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Summary
Summary
A READ WITH JENNA BOOK CLUB PICK * ONE OF TIME MAGAZINE 'S 100 BEST MYSTERY AND THRILLER BOOKS OF ALL TIME * INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER * A contemporary literary classic and "an accomplished psychological thriller ... absolutely chilling" ( Village Voice ), from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Goldfinch.
One of The Atlantic 's Great American Novels of the Past 100 Years
Under the influence of a charismatic classics professor, a group of clever, eccentric misfits at a New England college discover a way of thought and life a world away from their banal contemporaries. But their search for the transcendent leads them down a dangerous path, beyond human constructs of morality.
"A remarkably powerful novel [and] a ferociously well-paced entertainment . . . Forceful, cerebral, and impeccably controlled." -- The New York Times
Author Notes
Donna Tartt was born in Greenwood, Mississippi on December 23, 1963. She wrote her first novel while attending Bennington College, where she graduated in 1986. The novel, The Secret History, was published in 1992. Her other works include The Little Friend, which won the WH Smith Literary Award in 2003, and The Goldfinch, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 2014 for Best Fiction, the National Book Critics Circle Award in 2013 and the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence for Fiction. In 2014, Time named Tartt among their 100 Most Influential People.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
. Entertaining, evocative first novel; 12 weeks on PW 's bestseller list. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
This is a first novel of exceptional subtlety and suspense, featuring a haunting cast of characters. Somewhat reminiscent of Dead Poet's Society, a bit gothic, and inlaid with sophisticated psychology, it takes place on and around the campus of a small, private, Vermont liberal arts college. When Richard, a native of a small, dull California town, arrives at Hampden College to study Greek, he's startled by the changeability of the weather, the brooding skies, and brilliant autumn. Thoroughly alienated from his parents, he lies about his past, hoping to impress the tight-knit, wealthy, secretive, and tantalizingly eccentric group of classics scholars studying under the direction of influential mentor, Julian Morrow. Henry is tall, erudite, and frighteningly calculating. Francis is gay, sly, but affectionate. Bunny, an awful mooch but quite endearing, looks like Teddy Roosevelt and spouts a great deal of nonsense punctuated by exclamations of "old man" and "see here." Camilla and Charles are twins--cool, attractive, and charming. As Julian steeps his disciples in Greek thought, they become obsessed with an overwhelming desire to experience telestic madness, that is, Dionysiac frenzy. Their pursuit of this exalted, catastrophic state leads to conspiracy, subterfuge, murder, and suicide. Tartt's prose is flawless and enthralling: keyed-up, humming with detail, graced with nuance, and electric with the malevolence of self-righteous amorality and an insulated and heartless form of intelligence. (Reviewed Sept. 1, 1992)0679410325Donna Seaman
Guardian Review
1. It starts with a murder. The novelist's first trick is also her best: in a prologue, her narrator, Richard Pappin, tells us of the murder of Bunny, a crime "for which I was partly responsible". He appears to have got away with it - and yet to be haunted by it. "This is the only story I will ever be able to tell." We will have to read on to find out how he could have done such a thing. Coleridge said that Shakespeare always made apprehension predominate over surprise, and this is what Donna Tartt does. As we read The Secret History, we don't so much wonder what might happen as worry about what will happen. 2. It is in love with Ancient Greece. Donna Tartt proves the truth of what literary parents piously tell their children: nothing can beat the Greek myths. The main characters believe so strongly in the power of these myths that they find themselves enacting one of them. But the novel, through its narrator, is also in love with Greek philosophy and history, with Homer and Plato. At the (fictional) university of Hampden it admits us to Julian Morrow's select class of Hellenophiles and allows us to commune with the most alluring civilisation of all. 3. It has all the best elements of the campus novel. The college where the novel is set is just the picture: white clapboard and green shutters, a clock tower and ivied brick, the autumn glow of Vermont. Everyone who has ever been to university loves this peculiar subgenre, in which we can relive our earliest years of pretend adulthood. But it appeals to non-graduate readers too. Gilded youth is set free to experiment and be absurd; high pretensions co-exist with human weakness. Usually this mixture is comic, but Tartt is clever enough to see its darker potential. 4. It has a classic lonely narrator. Richard Pappin is perfectly prepared to be entranced. Friendless and frustrated, without family support or sympathy, he arrives at university to look for a better life - especially of the spirit. A clever boy from nowheresville, he sets out to "fabricate a new and far more satisfying history". At Hampden he is intoxicated to find himself in the company of the five eccentric, conceited, clever undergraduates who study Greek together and seal themselves off from the rest of the students. He does not so much befriend them as project his hopes and fantasies upon them. So he narrates with the force of passion. 5. It is full of quotations. Within a couple of sentences Richard is quoting from Rimbaud (unattributed and untranslated). The book is liberally scattered with wise sayings in Latin and Greek - genuine fragments of antiquity that are as often mysterious as they are sagacious. You are leaving the sublunary world behind and entering a realm of literary and linguistic riches. Outside the novel's pages people are watching TV and talking in cliches, but within them you are in the company of the best that has been said and thought. 6. It has a charismatic master of ceremonies. At this university there is only one teacher of ancient Greek, Julian, who accepts only a small number of intellectually qualified students. Sardonic, brilliant and charismatic, he presides like some academic magus over the aspirations of the characters. "I hope we're all ready to leave the phenomenal world, and enter into the sublime?" he asks rhetorically, at the beginning of one of his highly unconventional classes. Richard and his companions are devotees of a cult, and Julian is the secular priest, endlessly witty, incisive and mocking. 7. It is obsessed with beauty. Tartt's narrator seems little interested in sex, but is readily intoxicated by beauty: human, natural, or poetic. The novel notices how important beauty is to us, yet how rarely anyone speaks of it. "Khalepa ta kala. Beauty is harsh." (In the ancient Greek, the words for "beauty" and "harsh" chime with each other.) This is "about the first sentence that I ever learned in Greek" and becomes a dictum for Richard. He comes to relish "beauty that shocks you", as Alexander Pope put it - beauty jolts us out of our boredom. 8. It believes in fate. As he looks back on his life, Richard notices all the apparently chance events that led him into the story that he is now telling. Everything is an accident (he applies to Hampden because an old brochure for it falls out of a jacket pocket), and yet telling the story makes it appear destined. "Psychology is only another word for what the ancients called fate," declares Julian. The narrative is shaped by this ancient conviction. 9. It is possessed by Dionysos. Friedrich Nietzsche knew that Greek tragedy was made out of the clash between the powers of reason-giving Apollo and enrapturing Dionysos. Richard learns from his companions and his teacher that the roots of wisdom are not just in Greek rationality but also pagan ecstasy. DH Lawrence would have appreciated what Tartt has learned from the god of wine and ritual madness. Get out there in the woods and rip your clothes off! Richard and his clever, foolish fellow students are would-be bacchantes who learn all about the dangers of this allegiance. 10. It lets you in on secrets. Tartt's title is a cracker, not least because it is true to the appeal of the book. We, like Richard, are being given membership of a select group. One secret is given away at the book's opening, only because we can be assured that others lie in store. Every one of the millions who have read The Secret History has the delicious illusion of being admitted to the most dangerous of confidences. It is as if her every reader is the first and only one to read it. Donna Tartt discusses The Secret History with John Mullan at the Guardian Book Club on 19 November, 7pm, The Royal Geographical Society, 1 Kensington Gore, London SW7. Tickets pounds 12. theguardian.com/books/series/bookclub - ALAMY Caption: Captions: The autumn glow of Vermont . . . Bennington College, where Donna Tartt was a student 1. It starts with a murder. The novelist's first trick is also her best: in a prologue, her narrator, Richard Pappin, tells us of the murder of Bunny, a crime "for which I was partly responsible". He appears to have got away with it - and yet to be haunted by it. "This is the only story I will ever be able to tell." We will have to read on to find out how he could have done such a thing. Coleridge said that Shakespeare always made apprehension predominate over surprise, and this is what Donna Tartt does. As we read The Secret History, we don't so much wonder what might happen as worry about what will happen. 6. It has a charismatic master of ceremonies. At this university there is only one teacher of ancient Greek, [Julian Morrow], who accepts only a small number of intellectually qualified students. Sardonic, brilliant and charismatic, he presides like some academic magus over the aspirations of the characters. "I hope we're all ready to leave the phenomenal world, and enter into the sublime?" he asks rhetorically, at the beginning of one of his highly unconventional classes. Richard and his companions are devotees of a cult, and Julian is the secular priest, endlessly witty, incisive and mocking. 7. It is obsessed with beauty. Tartt's narrator seems little interested in sex, but is readily intoxicated by beauty: human, natural, or poetic. The novel notices how important beauty is to us, yet how rarely anyone speaks of it. "Khalepa ta kala. Beauty is harsh." (In the ancient Greek, the words for "beauty" and "harsh" chime with each other.) This is "about the first sentence that I ever learned in Greek" and becomes a dictum for Richard. He comes to relish "beauty that shocks you", as Alexander Pope put it - beauty jolts us out of our boredom. - ALAMY.
Kirkus Review
The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too- long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them--and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder--and might never have been if one of the gang--a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran--hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience-masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel- -``Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion.'' First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids- -while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's--and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal--and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.
Library Journal Review
This well-written first novel attempts to be several things: a psychological suspense thriller, a satire of collegiate mores and popular culture, and a philosophical bildungsroman. Supposedly brilliant students at a posh Vermont school (Bennington in thin disguise) are involved in two murders, one supposedly accidental and one deliberate. The book's many allusions, both literary and classical (the students are all classics majors studying with a professor described as both a genius and a deity) fail to provide the deeper resonance of such works as Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose . Ultimately, it works best as a psychological thriller. Expect prepublication hype to generate interest in this book and buy accordingly. Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 5/1/92.-- Charles Michaud, Turner Free Lib., Randolph, Mass. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
PROLOGUE THE SNOW in the mountains was melting and Bunny had been dead for several weeks before we came to understand the gravity of our situation. He'd been dead for ten days before they found him, you know. It was one of the biggest manhunts in Vermont history--state troopers, the FBI, even an army helicopter; the college closed, the dye factory in Hampden shut down, people coming from New Hampshire, upstate New York, as far away as Boston. It is difficult to believe that Henry's modest plan could have worked so well despite these unforeseen events. We hadn't intended to hide the body where it couldn't be found. In fact, we hadn't hidden it at all but had simply left it where it fell in hopes that some luckless passer-by would stumble over it before anyone even noticed he was missing. This was a tale that told itself simply and well: the loose rocks, the body at the bottom of the ravine with a clean break in the neck, and the muddy skidmarks of dug-in heels pointing the way down; a hiking accident, no more, no less, and it might have been left at that, at quiet tears and a small funeral, had it not been for the snow that fell that night; it covered him without a trace, and ten days later, when the thaw finally came, the state troopers and the FBI and the searchers from the town all saw that they had been walking back and forth over his body until the snow above it was packed down like ice. * It is difficult to believe that such an uproar took place over an act for which I was partially responsible, even more difficult to believe I could have walked through it--the cameras, the uniforms, the black crowds sprinkled over Mount Cataract like ants in a sugar bowl--without incurring a blink of suspicion. But walking through it all was one thing; walking away, unfortunately, has proved to be quite another, and though once I thought I had left that ravine forever on an April afternoon long ago, now I am not so sure. Now the searchers have departed, and life has grown quiet around me, I have come to realize that while for years I might have imagined myself to be somewhere else, in reality I have been there all the time: up at the top by the muddy wheel-ruts in the new grass, where the sky is dark over the shivering apple blossoms and the first chill of the snow that will fall that night is already in the air. What are you doing up here? said Bunny, surprised, when he found the four of us waiting for him. Why, looking for new ferns, said Henry. And after we stood whispering in the underbrush--one last look at the body and a last look round, no dropped keys, lost glasses, everybody got everything?--and then started single file through the woods, I took one glance back through the saplings that leapt to close the path behind me. Though I remember the walk back and the first lonely flakes of snow that came drifting through the pines, remember piling gratefully into the car and starting down the road like a family on vacation, with Henry driving clench-jawed through the potholes and the rest of us leaning over the seats and talking like children, though I remember only too well the long terrible night that lay ahead and the long terrible days and nights that followed, I have only to glance over my shoulder for all those years to drop away and I see it behind me again, the ravine, rising all green and black through the saplings, a picture that will never leave me. I suppose at one time in my life I might have had any number of stories, but now there is no other. This is the only story I will ever be able to tell. BOOK I CHAPTER 1 DOES SUCH a thing as "the fatal flaw," that showy dark crack running down the middle of a life, exist outside literature? I used to think it didn't. Now I think it does. And I think that mine is this: a morbid longing for the picturesque at all costs. A moi. L'histoire d'une de mes folies. My name is Richard Papen. I am twenty-eight years old and I had never seen New England or Hampden College until I was nineteen. I am a Californian by birth and also, I have recently discovered, by nature. The last is something I admit only now, after the fact. Not that it matters. I grew up in Plano, a small silicon village in the north. No sisters, no brothers. My father ran a gas station and my mother stayed at home until I got older and times got tighter and she went to work, answering phones in the office of one of the big chip factories outside San Jose. Plano. The word conjures up drive-ins, tract homes, waves of heat rising from the blacktop. My years there created for me an expendable past, disposable as a plastic cup. Which I suppose was a very great gift, in a way. On leaving home I was able to fabricate a new and far more satisfying history, full of striking, simplistic environmental influences; a colorful past, easily accessible to strangers. The dazzle of this fictive childhood--full of swimming pools and orange groves and dissolute, charming show-biz parents--has all but eclipsed the drab original. In fact, when I think about my real childhood I am unable to recall much about it at all except a sad jumble of objects: the sneakers I wore year-round; coloring books and comics from the supermarket; little of interest, less of beauty. I was quiet, tall for my age, prone to freckles. I didn't have many friends but whether this was due to choice or circumstance I do not now know. I did well in school, it seems, but not exceptionally well; I liked to read--Tom Swift, the Tolkien books--but also to watch television, which I did plenty of, lying on the carpet of our empty living room in the long dull afternoons after school. I honestly can't remember much else about those years except a certain mood that permeated most of them, a melancholy feeling that I associate with watching "The Wonderful World of Disney" on Sunday nights. Sunday was a sad day--early to bed, school the next morning, I was constantly worried my homework was wrong--but as I watched the fireworks go off in the night sky, over the floodlit castles of Disneyland, I was consumed by a more general sense of dread, of imprisonment within the dreary round of school and home: circumstances which, to me at least, presented sound empirical argument for gloom. My father was mean, and our house ugly, and my mother didn't pay much attention to me; my clothes were cheap and my haircut too short and no one at school seemed to like me that much; and since all this had been true for as long as I could remember, I felt things would doubtless continue in this depressing vein as far as I could foresee. In short: I felt my existence was tainted, in some subtle but essential way. I suppose it's not odd, then, that I have trouble reconciling my life to those of my friends, or at least to their lives as I perceive them to be. Charles and Camilla are orphans (how I longed to be an orphan when I was a child!) reared by grandmothers and great-aunts in a house in Virginia: a childhood I like to think about, with horses and rivers and sweet-gum trees. And Francis. His mother, when she had him, was only seventeen--a thin-blooded, capricious girl with red hair and a rich daddy, who ran off with the drummer for Vance Vane and his Musical Swains. She was home in three weeks, and the marriage was annulled in six; and, as Francis is fond of saying, the grandparents brought them up like brother and sister, him and his mother, brought them up in such a magnanimous style that even the gossips were impressed--English nannies and private schools, summers in Switzerland, winters in France. Consider even bluff old Bunny, if you would. Not a childhood of reefer coats and dancing lessons, any more than mine was. But an American childhood. Son of a Clemson football star turned banker. Four brothers, no sisters, in a big noisy house in the suburbs, with sailboats and tennis rackets and golden retrievers; summers on Cape Cod, boarding schools near Boston and tailgate picnics during football season; an upbringing vitally present in Bunny in every respect, from the way he shook your hand to the way he told a joke. I do not now nor did I ever have anything in common with any of them, nothing except a knowledge of Greek and the year of my life I spent in their company. And if love is a thing held in common, I suppose we had that in common, too, though I realize that might sound odd in light of the story I am about to tell. How to begin. Excerpted from The Secret History by Donna Tartt All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
