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The Secret History - Donna Tartt
I saw this in the bookstore on Friday while I was idly browsing for something to buy so I didn't just walk out with my drink from the cafe and nothing else, and I remembered that I had meant to read this for a while. By Sunday night, I was done with all 500+ densely typed small-print pages.
I needed something different from the light, forgettable books I've read so much of in the last few months, and this definitely filled that need. It was absolutely immersive in the best way. The writing is gorgeous, not just on the wordcraft level (although that, too; this book is a lavish feast of description) but also thematic and structural and just generally ... good! Good in the way where you feel that every choice was deliberate, every thematic styling meaningful. It was a really good book about incredibly compelling, terrible people. I did almost nothing on Saturday except read this book.
Also, in a twist that will surprise no one, it made me think of Babylon 5 in a couple of very specific ways. I'll put that at the end.
The other thing it reminded me of was The Great Gatsby, which .... knowing that the book is almost 40 years old and has been widely dissected, I don't know if this is something that's been talked about to death (is it widely known by basically everyone that it's sort of a Gatsby retelling? is that like the most obvious of obvious comparisons) but in any case, it was a similar reading experience (for me) of being slam-dunked into a world of terrible rich people who I want nothing more than to follow and find out what new entertainingly terrible thing they'll do next.
Also, the narration is lovely. This book has some shatteringly beautiful descriptions of fall/winter/spring in New England.
Secret History is narrated by Richard, a scholarship student at a small, exclusive liberal arts college in Vermont. The plot is built around a murder, but it's primarily a tapestry of the lives of an insular clique of awful rich students in the 1980s and the way they bounce off each other, their classmates, and the local working-class environment.
Richard concocts a made-up wealthy background for himself to fit in with his wealthy student peers in a hard-to-get-into Greek studies program that he aspires to, manages to join, and wants nothing more than to be accepted within. You'd think that having this house of cards fall down around him would be one of the book's main themes but it is absolutely not, except in the general thematic sense of lies vs truth and appearances vs reality, and also the sense that Richard thinks it is, to the point of almost getting himself killed because he can't admit that he has nowhere to stay over the holidays and is effectively homeless in a Vermont winter. I'm pretty sure that all his new friends clocked him immediately, in the same way that Richard clocked his gay classmate or the twins who are sleeping together, even though he absolutely does not admit this (narratively speaking) until late in the book, and also maintains his pseudo-deniable fiction that no one knows where he really comes from even when everyone else knows and Richard halfway knows that they know. (Richard at one point talks about how his friend Francis loves shopping and buys a lot more than he needs and gives away clothes all the time, so he's gotten a bunch of cool things from him. Richard, he's giving them to you because he can tell you're poor as dirt, and also he's in love with you, you absolute walnut.)
(Another thing I thought was well done is that Richard, who doesn't come from money but wildly aspires to be Like The Rich Kids, sees them more or less as a monolith, but the actual rich kids have a fairly steep class divide between those who have their own semi-independent funds - Francis and Henry - and the ones who don't - twins Clarissa and Charles, and murder victim Bunny - which they are very conscious of, but Richard doesn't seem to be.)
Richard is, in short, a wildly unreliable narrator, although in a way that's subtle enough to make it fascinating to spend time in his head. He is extremely introspective in that "sensitive kid who thinks they're deeper than they are" kind of way, where he gets lost in his own head a lot and understands less than he thinks he does; he is *almost* self-aware about his own selfishness, shallowness, and the extent to which he replicates the prejudices of his classmates, but also not. Is Richard bisexual and in love with at least one of his male classmates as much as he is with the female classmate that he knows he's in love with? Probably, and he sort of halfway seems to know this but is absolutely not going to admit it.
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snickfic said in her writeup that this is an interestingly unhorny book for how much sex the characters are having, and it kind of is. Most of the characters are regularly having orgies, to which Richard is not invited (which he is deeply frustrated about, lol). And they don't seem all that interested in their orgies either. And yet!! It's a book with an incredibly strong physicality. It's a very sensual book in a physically descriptive way, but it's really not a sexy book.
And I haven't even mentioned the murder yet.
On the first page, Richard and his group of fellow Classics students murder their classmate Bunny. The book then jumps back to Richard's early days at the college, and the first half of the book leads up to Bunny's inevitable murder. (And I gotta say, within a couple chapters of meeting the guy, it was fairly obvious why someone would kill Bunny even before we find out why they actually kill Bunny, which was to cover up a different murder, as you do.) The second half of the book is what follows, as the friend group unravels over their guilt, interpersonal tensions, and terror of being found out, and various people in the group start to realize that once you've already killed one person in your friend group to cover up a murder, this is definitely a slippery slope that is going to lead nowhere good.
This is a book that absolutely immerses you in the sights and sounds and ambiance of a particular setting (small town Vermont, fall/winter); it's about the incredible intensity of those first away-from-home college relationships, the way that those can turn on a dime from love to hate, uncritical admiration to sudden brutal knowledge of someone else's flaws. The characters are all differently terrible, including Richard; they make terrible choices, at every turn they could do something different and better, and they don't. And yet they're so completely immersed in their own respective worldviews that you can see why they don't, even while they're unraveling.
This is a book full of people making relentlessly stupid decisions that never makes you want to shake the author by the collar and go WHY ARE THEY BEING SO STUPID, because you can see exactly why they make every stupid decision and it feels inevitable that they're going to do that, even while you're also thinking "Richard, have you considered maybe *not* doing a bunch of cocaine and getting blackout drunk and going to bed with a girl you just met while also trying not to let anything slip about the multiple murders you're an accessory to."
(Every single one of these characters is living on a constant diet of booze, cocaine, uppers/downers, and cigarettes. The fact that any of them passed any of their classes, even apart from all the murder, is a god damn miracle.)
The writing is lovely; it's luminously gorgeous, and full of strange magic, and funny. You spend most of the book knowing where it's going, then at least suspecting where it's going, and yet every part of the journey is fascinating and somehow surprising. All the more so because there's *such* a sense of things unseen flashing below the surface. How much of the numinous/supernatural (the students' Dionysian ritual that appears to have contacted something real, the ghost sightings, the omens) is literally happening, and how much of it is simply drunken fantasies and/or people stuck in an emotional pressure cooker trying to find sense in it? Did Henry and Camilla - the two most inscrutable or at least most-opaque-to-Richard's-narration members of the group - *actually* find Bunny dead, or did they go ahead and kill him themselves after the first murder attempt? For that matter, are Henry and Camilla actually as emotionally inscrutable as Richard narrates them, or is it just that Richard can't figure them out, or doesn't want to admit it if he does? (Richard initially narrates Julian - their charismatic and cultishly admired professor - as equally inscrutable, but it turns out that Richard simply doesn't want to believe that someone he admires that much is actually as cold and shallow as Julian really is. How much of the impression we get of Henry and Camilla - glamorous, cool, hard to read - is just because Richard admires them and doesn't want to admit that they're shallow, selfish assholes, as opposed to the flawed yet comprehensible Francis and Charles, who he likes, but isn't as emotionally tangled up with?)
For that matter, how many of the telling details of the entire situation is Richard hiding from us - and from himself? I don't think Richard is at any point deliberately lying to the reader, but I do think he comes across as someone who's spent so much time overthinking the events of the book while emotionally cutting himself off from it that even his memories aren't that reliable. The people in the group that he loves most (Henry, Camilla, and Julian) are the ones that he is even self-admittedly the least objective about; he's probably being more accurate about Francis and Charles, both of whom come across as more - straightforward? I guess? in the sense that Richard is a lot less of an emotional tangle about them, so he's able to narrate them in a way that makes you feel like you're getting a more accurate impression of them. It's really interesting, because Charles's plans and motives are obscure for a big part of the post-murder part of the book, but you don't really feel like *Charles* is, as a person, whereas Henry is an absolute cipher right up into the end, while also being the person that Richard talks and thinks about the most. Camilla may well have disemboweled a guy, possibly with her teeth (the thing about her hair being soaked with blood ...), but you sure aren't going to hear about it from Richard, who is definitely not thinking about Camilla's part in the first murder as hard as he can.
You get the sense that this book from the point of view of any other character would be a completely different book, which I also love.
Let's see, what else. I have a lot of thoughts on this book! Another thing I think is really well done is the way that the weird, insular world-within-a-world of Richard and his cliquish friends exists in its own almost completely isolated bubble of reality - a kind of throwback to another time, or a sort of fairy tale - and it's always a bit of a shock for the reader (just as it is for the characters) when we get dropped back into the real college world of drugs, weekend parties, and bad cafeteria food. I kept being interested throughout those parts of the book that I was expecting it to feel more like my own (mid-90s) college experience and it doesn't; even the "real world" parts are a little bit unmoored in time, very clearly of an earlier era, though not *that* much earlier, but it's just culturally different from my own college experience in all these interesting little subtle ways, even though some parts of the whole experience (the parties, the inexplicable monstrosity the frat kids are building on the common lawn, the theme of constantly running into people you sort of know by way of other people and/or that one dorm neighbor you can't stand, etc) are #relatable. It made me think about a thing I read once, that children's book writers are always writing about their own childhood no matter when the book is supposed to be set, and this is definitely Donna Tartt writing about her own college experience even if the book is sort of ostensibly set around the time it was released.
I will end this part of the review (such as it is) with my wall-of-red-string analysis of who in this book is crushing on whom:
Richard -> Camilla (who he'll admit to) and Henry (who he won't)
Camilla -> Henry (possibly out of pure practicality/self-preservation) and Charles (her brother)
Charles -> Camilla (his sister) and possibly Henry (wildly jealous, but of whom?)
Francis -> Richard and Charles (but interestingly, he's probably the one person in the friend group who is *not* crushing on Henry, I think)
Henry -> Julian, if anyone (I'm truly unsure if there's actually anything other than weirdly intense friendship going on between Henry and Camilla, though Richard and Charles clearly think there is)
Bunny -> Henry if anyone, but possibly no one. They aren't even inviting him to the orgies! Clearly he had to die!
Okay so I've separated this off so that I can talk about both Babylon 5 and Secret History with spoilers and also without making this entire post About Babylon 5. I should add that they are incredibly different narratives, they don't feel similar at all, and neither of them is even remotely influenced by the other one.
And yet they have these things in common:
1. Tragedy - not just the what, but the how. I've thought a lot lately about the way Babylon 5 handles tragedy, and this book is very similar: tragedy in the classic sense, where people who could have been better bring on their own bad ends, and you can see every single wrong decision that led to the bad end, but at the same time it's hard to say that they could actually have made other decisions, because they're who they are. They had free will in every stupid, selfish choice, and yet, being the people they are makes it hard to say if they could have actually ever done anything else. It's not surprising that a book about Greek scholars is somewhat Greekly tragic, but Babylon 5 also does it in a very similar way, and getting the same feeling off both of them when they very clearly are not influenced by each other, but are drawing on the same underlying stratum of influences, was really interesting.
2. Numinousness - And the other thing is Secret History's casual use of the plausibly deniable supernatural. Ghosts and omens and portentious dreams and the possibility of being able to contact the underworld if you just try hard enough or simply take a meaningful-enough step in the wrong direction - but without actually making it unambiguous that any of the magical stuff is really happening. Babylon 5 was a lot more ... I don't know if the word I want here is optimistic, but there was more of a sense that that kind of thing (brief brushes with the supernatural/magical) can change you for the better, whereas here it's more like things that haunt you in the dark, powerful beyond belief, that you don't want to touch too closely. But in both cases, there's a sense that the characters are occasionally in contact with something unknowable and unreal, and the show/book itself leaves enough space that you can see it either as something which is literally happening, or a dream/hallucination/fantasy with just enough psychological truth in it that it feels real (and is real to them) without needing to literally be so.
(Actually the other book I can think of off the top of my head that has this sense of eerie magic permeating the real world without *quite* slipping over the line to become clearly identifiable as fantasy is Mark Helprin's Winter's Tale, which this also reminded me of in some ways, although that one is definitely more on the less-ambiguous fantasy end of the spectrum. At least based on my 30-years-ago memories of it.)
I needed something different from the light, forgettable books I've read so much of in the last few months, and this definitely filled that need. It was absolutely immersive in the best way. The writing is gorgeous, not just on the wordcraft level (although that, too; this book is a lavish feast of description) but also thematic and structural and just generally ... good! Good in the way where you feel that every choice was deliberate, every thematic styling meaningful. It was a really good book about incredibly compelling, terrible people. I did almost nothing on Saturday except read this book.
Also, in a twist that will surprise no one, it made me think of Babylon 5 in a couple of very specific ways. I'll put that at the end.
The other thing it reminded me of was The Great Gatsby, which .... knowing that the book is almost 40 years old and has been widely dissected, I don't know if this is something that's been talked about to death (is it widely known by basically everyone that it's sort of a Gatsby retelling? is that like the most obvious of obvious comparisons) but in any case, it was a similar reading experience (for me) of being slam-dunked into a world of terrible rich people who I want nothing more than to follow and find out what new entertainingly terrible thing they'll do next.
Also, the narration is lovely. This book has some shatteringly beautiful descriptions of fall/winter/spring in New England.
Secret History is narrated by Richard, a scholarship student at a small, exclusive liberal arts college in Vermont. The plot is built around a murder, but it's primarily a tapestry of the lives of an insular clique of awful rich students in the 1980s and the way they bounce off each other, their classmates, and the local working-class environment.
Richard concocts a made-up wealthy background for himself to fit in with his wealthy student peers in a hard-to-get-into Greek studies program that he aspires to, manages to join, and wants nothing more than to be accepted within. You'd think that having this house of cards fall down around him would be one of the book's main themes but it is absolutely not, except in the general thematic sense of lies vs truth and appearances vs reality, and also the sense that Richard thinks it is, to the point of almost getting himself killed because he can't admit that he has nowhere to stay over the holidays and is effectively homeless in a Vermont winter. I'm pretty sure that all his new friends clocked him immediately, in the same way that Richard clocked his gay classmate or the twins who are sleeping together, even though he absolutely does not admit this (narratively speaking) until late in the book, and also maintains his pseudo-deniable fiction that no one knows where he really comes from even when everyone else knows and Richard halfway knows that they know. (Richard at one point talks about how his friend Francis loves shopping and buys a lot more than he needs and gives away clothes all the time, so he's gotten a bunch of cool things from him. Richard, he's giving them to you because he can tell you're poor as dirt, and also he's in love with you, you absolute walnut.)
(Another thing I thought was well done is that Richard, who doesn't come from money but wildly aspires to be Like The Rich Kids, sees them more or less as a monolith, but the actual rich kids have a fairly steep class divide between those who have their own semi-independent funds - Francis and Henry - and the ones who don't - twins Clarissa and Charles, and murder victim Bunny - which they are very conscious of, but Richard doesn't seem to be.)
Richard is, in short, a wildly unreliable narrator, although in a way that's subtle enough to make it fascinating to spend time in his head. He is extremely introspective in that "sensitive kid who thinks they're deeper than they are" kind of way, where he gets lost in his own head a lot and understands less than he thinks he does; he is *almost* self-aware about his own selfishness, shallowness, and the extent to which he replicates the prejudices of his classmates, but also not. Is Richard bisexual and in love with at least one of his male classmates as much as he is with the female classmate that he knows he's in love with? Probably, and he sort of halfway seems to know this but is absolutely not going to admit it.
snickfic said in her writeup that this is an interestingly unhorny book for how much sex the characters are having, and it kind of is. Most of the characters are regularly having orgies, to which Richard is not invited (which he is deeply frustrated about, lol). And they don't seem all that interested in their orgies either. And yet!! It's a book with an incredibly strong physicality. It's a very sensual book in a physically descriptive way, but it's really not a sexy book.And I haven't even mentioned the murder yet.
On the first page, Richard and his group of fellow Classics students murder their classmate Bunny. The book then jumps back to Richard's early days at the college, and the first half of the book leads up to Bunny's inevitable murder. (And I gotta say, within a couple chapters of meeting the guy, it was fairly obvious why someone would kill Bunny even before we find out why they actually kill Bunny, which was to cover up a different murder, as you do.) The second half of the book is what follows, as the friend group unravels over their guilt, interpersonal tensions, and terror of being found out, and various people in the group start to realize that once you've already killed one person in your friend group to cover up a murder, this is definitely a slippery slope that is going to lead nowhere good.
This is a book that absolutely immerses you in the sights and sounds and ambiance of a particular setting (small town Vermont, fall/winter); it's about the incredible intensity of those first away-from-home college relationships, the way that those can turn on a dime from love to hate, uncritical admiration to sudden brutal knowledge of someone else's flaws. The characters are all differently terrible, including Richard; they make terrible choices, at every turn they could do something different and better, and they don't. And yet they're so completely immersed in their own respective worldviews that you can see why they don't, even while they're unraveling.
This is a book full of people making relentlessly stupid decisions that never makes you want to shake the author by the collar and go WHY ARE THEY BEING SO STUPID, because you can see exactly why they make every stupid decision and it feels inevitable that they're going to do that, even while you're also thinking "Richard, have you considered maybe *not* doing a bunch of cocaine and getting blackout drunk and going to bed with a girl you just met while also trying not to let anything slip about the multiple murders you're an accessory to."
(Every single one of these characters is living on a constant diet of booze, cocaine, uppers/downers, and cigarettes. The fact that any of them passed any of their classes, even apart from all the murder, is a god damn miracle.)
The writing is lovely; it's luminously gorgeous, and full of strange magic, and funny. You spend most of the book knowing where it's going, then at least suspecting where it's going, and yet every part of the journey is fascinating and somehow surprising. All the more so because there's *such* a sense of things unseen flashing below the surface. How much of the numinous/supernatural (the students' Dionysian ritual that appears to have contacted something real, the ghost sightings, the omens) is literally happening, and how much of it is simply drunken fantasies and/or people stuck in an emotional pressure cooker trying to find sense in it? Did Henry and Camilla - the two most inscrutable or at least most-opaque-to-Richard's-narration members of the group - *actually* find Bunny dead, or did they go ahead and kill him themselves after the first murder attempt? For that matter, are Henry and Camilla actually as emotionally inscrutable as Richard narrates them, or is it just that Richard can't figure them out, or doesn't want to admit it if he does? (Richard initially narrates Julian - their charismatic and cultishly admired professor - as equally inscrutable, but it turns out that Richard simply doesn't want to believe that someone he admires that much is actually as cold and shallow as Julian really is. How much of the impression we get of Henry and Camilla - glamorous, cool, hard to read - is just because Richard admires them and doesn't want to admit that they're shallow, selfish assholes, as opposed to the flawed yet comprehensible Francis and Charles, who he likes, but isn't as emotionally tangled up with?)
For that matter, how many of the telling details of the entire situation is Richard hiding from us - and from himself? I don't think Richard is at any point deliberately lying to the reader, but I do think he comes across as someone who's spent so much time overthinking the events of the book while emotionally cutting himself off from it that even his memories aren't that reliable. The people in the group that he loves most (Henry, Camilla, and Julian) are the ones that he is even self-admittedly the least objective about; he's probably being more accurate about Francis and Charles, both of whom come across as more - straightforward? I guess? in the sense that Richard is a lot less of an emotional tangle about them, so he's able to narrate them in a way that makes you feel like you're getting a more accurate impression of them. It's really interesting, because Charles's plans and motives are obscure for a big part of the post-murder part of the book, but you don't really feel like *Charles* is, as a person, whereas Henry is an absolute cipher right up into the end, while also being the person that Richard talks and thinks about the most. Camilla may well have disemboweled a guy, possibly with her teeth (the thing about her hair being soaked with blood ...), but you sure aren't going to hear about it from Richard, who is definitely not thinking about Camilla's part in the first murder as hard as he can.
You get the sense that this book from the point of view of any other character would be a completely different book, which I also love.
Let's see, what else. I have a lot of thoughts on this book! Another thing I think is really well done is the way that the weird, insular world-within-a-world of Richard and his cliquish friends exists in its own almost completely isolated bubble of reality - a kind of throwback to another time, or a sort of fairy tale - and it's always a bit of a shock for the reader (just as it is for the characters) when we get dropped back into the real college world of drugs, weekend parties, and bad cafeteria food. I kept being interested throughout those parts of the book that I was expecting it to feel more like my own (mid-90s) college experience and it doesn't; even the "real world" parts are a little bit unmoored in time, very clearly of an earlier era, though not *that* much earlier, but it's just culturally different from my own college experience in all these interesting little subtle ways, even though some parts of the whole experience (the parties, the inexplicable monstrosity the frat kids are building on the common lawn, the theme of constantly running into people you sort of know by way of other people and/or that one dorm neighbor you can't stand, etc) are #relatable. It made me think about a thing I read once, that children's book writers are always writing about their own childhood no matter when the book is supposed to be set, and this is definitely Donna Tartt writing about her own college experience even if the book is sort of ostensibly set around the time it was released.
I will end this part of the review (such as it is) with my wall-of-red-string analysis of who in this book is crushing on whom:
Richard -> Camilla (who he'll admit to) and Henry (who he won't)
Camilla -> Henry (possibly out of pure practicality/self-preservation) and Charles (her brother)
Charles -> Camilla (his sister) and possibly Henry (wildly jealous, but of whom?)
Francis -> Richard and Charles (but interestingly, he's probably the one person in the friend group who is *not* crushing on Henry, I think)
Henry -> Julian, if anyone (I'm truly unsure if there's actually anything other than weirdly intense friendship going on between Henry and Camilla, though Richard and Charles clearly think there is)
Bunny -> Henry if anyone, but possibly no one. They aren't even inviting him to the orgies! Clearly he had to die!
Okay so I've separated this off so that I can talk about both Babylon 5 and Secret History with spoilers and also without making this entire post About Babylon 5. I should add that they are incredibly different narratives, they don't feel similar at all, and neither of them is even remotely influenced by the other one.
And yet they have these things in common:
1. Tragedy - not just the what, but the how. I've thought a lot lately about the way Babylon 5 handles tragedy, and this book is very similar: tragedy in the classic sense, where people who could have been better bring on their own bad ends, and you can see every single wrong decision that led to the bad end, but at the same time it's hard to say that they could actually have made other decisions, because they're who they are. They had free will in every stupid, selfish choice, and yet, being the people they are makes it hard to say if they could have actually ever done anything else. It's not surprising that a book about Greek scholars is somewhat Greekly tragic, but Babylon 5 also does it in a very similar way, and getting the same feeling off both of them when they very clearly are not influenced by each other, but are drawing on the same underlying stratum of influences, was really interesting.
2. Numinousness - And the other thing is Secret History's casual use of the plausibly deniable supernatural. Ghosts and omens and portentious dreams and the possibility of being able to contact the underworld if you just try hard enough or simply take a meaningful-enough step in the wrong direction - but without actually making it unambiguous that any of the magical stuff is really happening. Babylon 5 was a lot more ... I don't know if the word I want here is optimistic, but there was more of a sense that that kind of thing (brief brushes with the supernatural/magical) can change you for the better, whereas here it's more like things that haunt you in the dark, powerful beyond belief, that you don't want to touch too closely. But in both cases, there's a sense that the characters are occasionally in contact with something unknowable and unreal, and the show/book itself leaves enough space that you can see it either as something which is literally happening, or a dream/hallucination/fantasy with just enough psychological truth in it that it feels real (and is real to them) without needing to literally be so.
(Actually the other book I can think of off the top of my head that has this sense of eerie magic permeating the real world without *quite* slipping over the line to become clearly identifiable as fantasy is Mark Helprin's Winter's Tale, which this also reminded me of in some ways, although that one is definitely more on the less-ambiguous fantasy end of the spectrum. At least based on my 30-years-ago memories of it.)
no subject
Bunny is truly THE WORST. He'd drive a much lesser man than Henry to (second) murder.
I enjoyed all your thoughts on Richard as an unreliable narrator. He's actually the character I felt like I had the least handle on, even less than Henry.
no subject
Never has a man so thoroughly deserved to be murdered by his entire friend group! Even before he decided blackmail was his new favorite hobby! AMAZING.
Regarding the crushes, my only shippy feelings I got out of the book were that I wanted Francis and Camilla to have sad miserable sex about Charles.
I don't really have any shippy feelings for anyone in this book in particular - the question of whether sex would fix them or make them worse is abundantly answered literally anytime anyone in this book has sex with anyone, lol - but I can see it.
I really enjoyed your write-up as well! I didn't have the same problem with the lack of detail around the murder, but I definitely see what you mean about how oddly circumspect the book is about it.
no subject
If you enjoy books about groups of students with a weirdly intense relationship who end up murdering one of their own and then having to deal with the fallout, I also enjoyed If We Were Villains by ML Rio. It's got its flaws (it feels pretentious at times, and it frequently uses brackets in a way that's bad for flow, and these stupid teenagers won't stop quoting Shakespeare in the middle of serious conversations), but it very much delivered on my desire for a weird, claustrophobic friend group having a lot of feelings about each other and being haunted by their own terrible decisions.