Customer Reviews

The Secret History

5 star:		(361)
4 star:		(112)
3 star:		(53)
2 star:		(41)
1 star:		(44)

 

 

First of all, I am not a Greek or Latin scholar or a student of comparative literature. Nor did I attend a highfalutin New England Ivy League school. I didn't understand the occasional lines of Greek, Latin, and French in this book, and I'm not an intellectual snob. But these small details don't detract from the thoroughly enjoyable experience of reading the Secret History. If you appreciate a well-written, well-told story that entertains, has good character development, an intriguing story, and reveals more than a little about human nature, you're going to like this book. As if that weren't enough, there's also a liberal dose of contempt for the rich, and who doesn't enjoy that?! For those who've studied Greek, Latin, French or the classics, the story will be even more rewarding.

Tartt uses Richard, the most accessible character, to tell the story with ease and authenticity. The six main characters (all in their early twenties) live in their own insular world at a small New England upper crust college, studying the classics with one solitary professor. There's Henry, the leader and probably the one most likely to succeed as a true scholar; Francis, the skittish hypochondriac; Charles and Camilla, the twins; Bunny, the obnoxious and ill-fated one of the bunch; and Richard, the California kid from the most humble background of all. At first, Richard can't believe his great luck to fall in with such a gilded clique, but as usual, things are not as they appear. Soon, the outer world intrudes (they bring this upon themselves, of course) and things fall apart. It's the telling of the unraveling that grips you as Tartt deftly controls how much to tell and when. I marveled at her lush descriptions that rival a poet's, her skill at narrative and dialogue, and her most revealing descriptions of human mannerisms and behavior. She repeatedly builds intrigue and tension all the way to the end of the 500+ pages of the novel. This is no easy task, but she makes it look effortless. While reading it with an eye on technique, I think, "of course that's how it's done."

When this book came out 10 years ago, Donna Tartt was reported to have been paid the highest publishing advance ever for a first book, over $400,000. I don't know if the book is worth that or not, not knowing how worth is calculated in the publishing industry. Still, having read the Secret History, I can see what all of Tartt's fans have been waiting for these past 10 years, and the Little Friend is now on my list of must-reads.

Secret History is "definitely cinematic, baby." Images of The Bad Seed, Village of the Damned, and the Talented Mr. Ripley came to mind early in the story as Tartt developed the characters. The setting is so clearly drawn in some parts that I suspect Tartt wrote them with an eye on cinematic rendering. A top Hollywood director currently holds the rights and I'm looking forward to the movie.

The Ballantine Books Reader's Circle edition contains "A Conversation with Donna Tartt" along with "Questions and Topics for Discussion" for those fortunate enough to read this book in a group setting. I loved reading Tartt's list of authors she admires. It's no surprise that her list of poets is even longer. All of her interests are well represented in the Secret History, and if you share any of these, reading the book will be an even more fulfilling experience.

Don't be put off by the setting and character types in this book. You don't have to be a literary snob to understand or enjoy the story. It's worth the time to read the book, and if you're an aspiring writer, there is much here to educate and marvel at. I highly recommend the Secret History.

There are a number of reasons that The Secret History has been one of my favorite leisure-reading selections for several years (and I have to admit that I re-read it periodically, typically devouring it in 2 or 3 nights). I think Donna Tartt's greatest gift lies in her ability to create a story that has the suspense and sales appeal of a mainstream bestseller AND a tremendous richness of texture, with a bit of philosophical and intellectual weight thrown in for good measure (granted, the book's not as deep as some people claim it is, but compared to the flimflam put out by authors like Robert Jordan or Tom Clancy or John Grisham, it's practically a college curriculum wrapped up into a single volume!). Ms. Tartt can create a mood and evoke a setting like no other popular writer I can think of, and I find her descriptive powers, her dialogue, and her attention to detail to be irresistible. I went to college in the late '80s, and I was a lower-middle-class kid from central Texas who wound up in an Ivy-league institution that, although it wasn't nearly as insular or uniformly snobbish as "Hampden"/Bennington College, had its fair share of decadent preppies. So to me, at least, a lot of Richard Papen's insecurities and anxieties ring true-to-life.

One last note: to readers who were bored or put off by the references to Greek, Latin, French, and English literature, I would suggest that, rather than condemn Ms. Tartt for being pretentious or pedantic, we be excited that someone has the daring and the ability to create a novel that has a high idea-to-page ratio AND supports an exciting, appealing story. If you don't understand an allusion, look it up and learn something new! [I'm a college instructor myself, so pardon a bit of pedantry on my part... :-) !]

Since I'm so late to the game with regards to Donna Tartt's hit novel "The Secret History", I'll just try to list the things I found striking about the book, both positive and negative:

1) The author is clearly knowledgeable about ancient Greek, and conveys some of the power and expressiveness inherent in the language (or so I imagine -- I never studied it myself, but I would like to after reading this book).

2) "The Secret History" is definitely a page-turner. I read it in a mad frenzy over three days. I think the author "cheated" to keep my interest though -- clues to the plot are parcelled out quite parsimoniously and the reader is forced to share the confusion and gradual dawning of the narrator. It's well done but frustrating; the epicenter of my annoyance lies with the character of Henry, who is inscrutable and enigmatic throughout. The novel might have been less exciting without this haze thrown over the main characters' motivations, but it seems kind of cheap to build suspense by teasing the reader with half-heard conversations and veiled comments all the time.

3) The characters are drawn quickly and convincingly, but not fleshed out as much as I'd expect from such an ambitious novel. Otherwise I think the author's writing style is very good -- some nice turns of phrase but still very readable and not show-offy. Some reviewers here have complained about the brief bits of non-English dialogue. There are a few times when it's not translated, but they were rare enough not to bother me.

4) You can definitely guess what kind of college life the author had from "The Secret History". In the book she mercilessly stereotypes vapid cokeheads, aggressive party boys and loopy hippies. The main characters, a group of six students studying ancient Greek and the classics together, are very segregated from their schoolmates and the outside world.

5) If I drank as much and slept as little in college as the characters in this book, I don't think that I'd have had the stamina to graduate. Otherwise, the novel progresses pretty plausibly, reminding me of the movie "The Simple Plan": A seemingly simple situation grows more and more thorny as the tension escalates and the students take actions that seem reasonable at the time, but have unintended consequences.

All in all it was a good read. I especially enjoyed that it got me excited about the classics -- Now I wish I had the time, talent, and energy to learn ancient Greek.

This book is worth reading, but don't set your expectations too high. I wanted to like this book. The reviews and summaries were compelling - Greek students performing ancient rites, a secret society, a bit of mystery topped off with a murder. This was something I couldn't pass up.

I really did want to like this book.

The premise of this book held promise, and unlike other reviewers, I didn't think the beginning was too slow. I was willing to be patient, I was willing to allow Tartt the freedom to develop the characters and establish the scene. And from time to time, I was rewarded. There are some wonderfully written passages in this novel, and I did find a couple of the characters likable. Unfortunately, though, Tartt's flashes of brilliance were usually followed by stumbling blocks of cliches. One moment I would find myself awed by her words, the next moment would find me with my head dropped in disappointment wondering if she bothered to proofread her own work.

I thought the main character was too passive a participant and not interesting at all. Yes, maybe that is who he was supposed to be, but I found myself not caring what happened to him. Usually a passive, unmotivated character kills a novel, and in this case, he nearly did. His actions became increasingly difficult to believe, especially during the winter break when he didn't have the common sense to leave the warehouse where he lived - a room with a hole in the roof that allowed snow to fall into drifts in his room. I can only imagine that Tartt was trying to be purposely cryptic and symbolic here, because for the life of me, I can figure out no other reason why the character would put up with this.

Bunny (the victim as revealed on page one) was the most annoying character I've read in fiction in a while - I'm surprised he lasted as long as he did - which brings up another issue. I had a hard time believing that a person despised this much by everyone around him was allowed into the "circle." He freely spent their money, verbally abused them, and lived off their family in some cases, yet the group felt protective of him for no given reason. Tartt attempted to explain that there was some portion of Bunny's personality that people found mysteriously attractive, but instead of showing us that and allowing the reader to find that same aspect attractive, thereby allowing the reader to sympathize with the other characters' feelings, she merely told us this attractiveness existed.

And while I've lived the college town life and can personally vouch for the experience of being treated differently than a local, Tartt seems to take it to the extreme here. She inconsistently paints this town, one moment it seems like 1950's America with all the typical attitudes, the next moment the town is modern with obvious references to recent lifestyles. I'm not sure if this was intentional, or something Tartt overlooked.

I was disappointed in Tartt's succumbing to the temptation of making incest as the big secret between twin brother and sister. This is more of a cliché than I think most people realize. Brother and sister twins frequently have to field "jokes" from friends concerning their sexual habits, and for Tartt to include that was just another cliché to throw on the large pile she had already built.

What I did enjoy about this novel was what it revealed about our mentors, heroes, and role-models - that they're human. And sometimes as we look up at them, we make them more than they really are. Then faced with a real-life crisis, we learn their faults at a time when we need them to be their strongest. Sometimes those role-models betray us. Unfortunately, this is only briefly revealed near the end of the novel and not fully developed.

Overall, I would recommend reading this book, not because some claim it will one day be a classical, and not because it's a particularly compelling story, but because there are glimpses of what Tartt can become with more experience under her belt.

I come away from this book at a loss as to what to say about it: It deserves both high praise and heavy criticism. It is a rapturous, beautiful, intricate and balanced work of art; it is also oddly archaic, strangely disconnected from reality, and oftentimes more dissolute than well-worked.

In praise, its insight into the kind of effete degeneracy that seems to well up when one isolates maturing intellectuals with one another is chillingly apt: It is apt, however, more in the sense of metaphor than in any naturalistic sense. The romance, luxuriousness, and cruel beauty of the cultivated degeneracy Tartt takes as her theme is evoked with brilliance and not inconsiderable talent.

In way of criticism, however, the novel is long and hangs loosely on its frame; its narrator, a character standing halfway between the position of a blank-slate observer and a character in his own right, vacillates between transparency and muddiness, his gestures toward the development of a personality alternatingly muddy and tragic, and this narratorial shapelessness contributes to the baggy-monsterness of the text as a whole.

Though it is easy to identify the themes of the work in broad strokes, I come away from an attentive reading of the text without being able to put my finger on its moral center, which is, I think, a flaw in Tartt's writing, not an element of her design; _The Secret History_ works very hard to achieve a sense of this moral center, and it is a very grave and wise one, at that; but it fails to alight on it definitively. The novel does not easily settle into the sum of its parts.

A very unsettling element of this book is the weird timelessness of its setting: I had to guess continuously when it might have been set, my first guess being the sixties, then gradually moving up through the decades as bits of background information trickled through the text. As nearly as I can tell, it takes place in the eighties--a time during which students use typewriters and rely on pay phones, but contextually after the sixties and seventies. Being the eighties, however, virtually every character speaks in his own bizarrely archaic voice: Bunny sounds like a hybrid of Teddy Roosevelt and Gatsby; Francis like a Victorian effeminate; and the unflattering peripheral characters like technicolor Californians or oddly outdated cokeheads. I can't determine whether this is an element of its structure or a flaw.

Finally, as a Classicist myself I came away with the uncertain suspicion that Tartt does not actually herself possess any classical languages. Virtually every instance of Greek in the text is orthographically wrong in some way; for instance I saw a lambda mysteriously mistyped as a gamma, that is, flipped upside down in the transcription process (it caused the word to read "pogyeides" not "polyeides"); and when the diacritical marks aren't wrong, they're lacking. These quibbles aside, it may well be that we ought to blame the typesetter, not the author, because Tartt's use of classical material in the text is unwaveringly appropriate and often quite erudite.

Despite its flaws, the book is intoxicating: I took a long shower the day I finished it, when I was about halfway through; I didn't realize until halfway through the thirty-minute soak that I was lingering because I actually felt _infected_ by the guilt of Tartt's characters, that my immersion in this book had made me uncleanly complicit to their crimes, their dread. This little work of sympathetic magic on her part is a testament to the intellectual and moral impact of her text, and, I think, excuses in itself the flaws one may point out in it; it is, moreover, beautifully written and unflaggingly rich. This book may never be a classic, but it is without a doubt fiction of literary merit.

I find it ironic that this book which was so inpired by the classics was the one to make me cast away my copies of Milton, Chaucer and even Balzac for more contemporary fiction. In a world taken over by Mary Higgins Clark and Danielle Steele, it is nice to know that there is something else out there. In contrast to many of the reviews I have read, I didn't feel that the characters were unlikeable. I admired Henry for his intelligence and discipline, I was surprised by his supposed sacrifice for Charles' sake which did give his character more depth. From the moment I started reading, I couldn't put it down. I found that I was able to identify with all of these characters, Richard for his insecurities with his former life, Bunny for his tendency to say the wrong thing without realizing or caring, Francis for so badly desiring something he could not have, Charles for his all consuming jealousy, Henry for his stubborness and Camilla for her imagined fears. It was my ability to identify with all of the characters that made me so interested in the story. So few books are able to capture my interest for 500+ pages. "The Secret History" was beautifully written. Tartt was able to accuratly put into words the picture of a small New England town. It is true that she often added details, not quite subplots, to the story that didn't have much to do with the main plot, but that is part of the beauty of her writing. It makes for a more realistic story with these added details. Life is generally random, unrelated events all woven together contributing to some greater purpose, though not always directly. Stories that can be wrapped up nicely under a big red bow, with every part contributing to the last page may be easier to read,and they may be shorter, but not that realistic, or even that interesting.

The positive reviews here are not exaggerated, and there's not much that I can add. Do yourself a favour and read the book!

Regarding some of the negative reviews: There's nothing wrong with NOT liking a novel (or any other book for that matter) because of one's tastes. But isn't it a bit immature to hate a book because you can't 'identify' with the characters? In real life, there are a lot of people with whom we can't identify, people we don't particularly like. But they still exist. There's nothing we can do about the fact that they were born. Fiction is when someone reinvents real life. So it is quite normal that there are unlikeable characters in fiction. I'd rather have ambiguous or even totally despicable characters that are well portrayed than glorious hero-types in a comic book without pictures. I find this phenomenon in all kinds of creative work: People hate films with excellent actors, directors and scripts because of the subject matter. Usually the same people who doubt the artistry and craftsmanship of a genius because there are only 'ugly' people in his paintings.

I read this book almost ten years ago and it still resonates a feeling of having read a book that was satisfying. The elements of suspense, literature, classicism, college life, and growing pains combined for a fulfilling literary experience.
Readers got a glimpse of the privileged life of America's "elite" and how one young man longed to belong. He didn't realize that the games he played would involve murder and deception. I loved the concept of the Classics theme. I plan on re-reading this book and will definitely order the new one.

It's difficult to read a book and enjoy it, even when it has a tense plot, when you have to keep swallowing unbelievable events and situations. I don't care if it was meant to be quirky; I cannot and will not believe that a young man in the late '80s/early 90's (and believe me, it took quite a bit of sleuthing on my part to even figure out when the novel took place)would use words like "old horse," "chum," or "old sport." I can swallow that the kids maybe dressed in vintage clothing to affect a certain air, for I have known these types of pretentious dandies myself,the type that walk around campus wearing pocket watches and carrying walking sticks. But it seems like this pretention went too far here; it's all too much. The hardest to swallow is how insulated these kids are. At one point, Richard tells us that his new classmates were aghast to find out that man had walked on the moon! Where did they go to high school and grammar school? On Jupiter? Quirky characters are one thing, but these characters were far too distracting and irritating in their self-involvement to allow me to enjoy this book fully.

While there are no pages left to read, this remarkable story still haunts my thoughts and occupies many of my conversations. "The Secret History" is destined to be a classic. Not only is it beautifully and artfully written, but the story is completely original- unlike anything I've read before. (Comparrisons to "Crime and Punishment" abound, but should be disregarded; apart from a first-person perspective on committing an unthinkable crime, there is so much more to this story, especially in terms of the various relationships and phenomenal character development.)

Simply put, the plot goes something like this: when the narrator Richard moves from California to enroll in Hampden College in Vermont, he becomes intrigued by a close-knit group of students studying the Classics with a seemingly unconventional professor. Upon gaining entry into their classes and subsequently their lives, he becomes entangled in a murder of a friend. However, there is SO much more to the book and the characters than I would want anyone to know prior to reading this novel.

This book is not only a wonderful choice for book clubs, but would be an interesting requirement (or recommended reading) for various courses in psychology, sociology, criminology, and of course literature and the Classics.

I can not rave highly enough about this novel and hope it continues to garner tremendous success. I look forward to reading more from this author, and would love if someone made this into a movie!