The Secret History by Donna Tartt
A Cerebral and Fast-Moving Campus Thriller
Donna Tartt's first novel blends erudition with suspense to produce a satisfying and likeable novel in "The Secret History"
Success of The Secret History Surprises Tartt
When Donna Tartt’s The Secret History became a bestseller in the 1990s, it took the author rather by surprise. She hadn’t originally thought the intellectual thriller was publishable, having pointed out to a friend that it contained phrases in Ancient Greek and would be a little abstruse for a general readership. But The Secret History’s combination of Classical references, American campus culture, and murder has quickly elevated it to the contentious status of “modern classic.”
Tartt is often linked with her more famous college contemporary Brett Easton Ellis, though there seems to be little similarity between their work. Possibly the association seems more important than it is since Tartt came to fame with a novel about a group of college students: The Secret History concerns an exclusive clique of Classics students who attempt to revive an ancient religious ritual, and are later driven to murder one of their own members.
Style in The Secret History
Tartt’s style in The Secret History is extravagant, full of striking and even overcooked metaphors, with one pair of characters compared in a single paragraph to Flemish angels, ghosts, and “celebrants at some long-forgotten garden party.” The sentences are often extremely long, and Tartt has mentioned rebelling against the clipped, terse style favoured by many of her contemporaries who came through creative wiring programs.
It is very much a first novel: consciously intellectual, full of literary references, and narrated by a strong first-person voice with an equally strong sense of doom and malaise. It is noticeable that many of her fans cite The Secret History as a favourite book from their teenage years, and some readers find the style tiresome, but Tartt’s appeal has lasted for fifteen years so far, and looks set to continue, if the excitement over her 2002 novel The Little Friend is anything to go by.
Though the most memorable parts of the novel concern the clique’s time together under their magnetic professor Julian Morrow, most of The Secret History’s action concerns the group’s gradual disintegration after they murder “Bunny” Corcoran. Rather like Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, the book has stuck in the public’s mind as a nostalgic evocation of erudite university life, when both novels are mostly concerned with other and darker matters. Indeed, Tartt’s sharp observations of the ordinary suburban characters whom her protagonist loathes suggest a more mature novelist showing through the lush and tempting world of her central clique.
Difficult to Put Down
Though variously defined as a campus novel, a murder mystery, an “intellectual thriller”, a piece of Southern Gothic, and compared to books from The Name of the Rose to The Rules of Attraction, Donna Tartt’s first novel is difficult to pin down. It is, however, an enthralling and popular book, giving an interesting glimpse into its author’s yearnings towards European culture, and deep roots in American life.
