The Secret History (Donna Tartt) Review
Does knowing how a story ends necessarily spoil the story? Especially for a murder mystery, you would expect that knowing the culprit would ruin the intrigue. So when mastermind Donna Tartt revealed everything from the get-go, I was utterly baffled. She broke the rules I thought existed in the mystery genre, yet instantly had me hungry for more.
So now let me spoil the story for you...
Tartt shares that a group of friends purposefully push their buddy Bunny off a cliff right before April snow so that everyone believes it is just an accident. She baits us with one key missing piece of information: why?
And all this in a two-page prologue that I might have skipped if it had not been assigned by my professor. Yes, I am guilty of skimming through prologues. Aren't we all? I often assume that there cannot be enough information or substance in such a short frame. Prologues set the tone of the story and feed the reader unsatisfying crumbs. But the best prologues give readers enough to anticipate that this book will deliver a story to remember.
And Tartt delivers.
But not if you are looking for a typical murder mystery or a thriller of any sort.
The Secret History honestly reads more like a coming-of-age novel, a J.D. Salinger set in a lush New England backdrop at a liberal arts college campus. The first-person narrator, Richard Papen, has a vice for the opulent life and a talent for fibbing.
What really struck me odd and Salinger familiar was Papen's casual voice. In fact, each key character has a nonchalant shrug-off attitude towards everything in life, except Greek studies and booze. The very first lines of the prologue might demonstrate that better.
"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."
Right before Bunny is killed, the hunter and hunted have the most alarmingly understated conversation in betrayal history.
"What are you doing up here? said Bunny, surprised, when he found the four of us waiting for him.
Why, looking for ferns, said Henry."
More about the characters. The narrator, Richard, lays clear his desires and motivations from the first chapter, but it took me longer to warm up to his character. I can see why he tries to lie his way through everything, he is afraid his bland background and personality will bore everyone and himself to death. So he contrives a fancy upbringing that traps him later.
The other five characters consist of two of the sweetest, most gorgeous but fatal twins, a dandy, a hyperactive and overly charismatic Bunny, and the reticent yet imposing Henry.
Henry, by far, was my favorite character. Also the most puzzling. Sometimes I think he's the true star, a Gatsby, while Richard is Tom, the observing side-narrator. He says so little, his movements are so simple, and his attitude so blasé, that everything about him carries so much weight. He is the only character in the story to fall with grace. Even though his pride breaks, it ends somehow intact.
Meanwhile, Bunny is Richard's foil. Their circumstances are so similar, yet they approach life in polar opposite directions. Richard hides the truth, Bunny touts the truth too loud. But Bunny's death does not stop his suffocating reach. Bunny does a good job of haunting his friends from the grave.
For the final, most crucial question to address: why would friends kill a fellow friend?
Skip my answer if you want to find out yourself. Go buy yourself a copy of Tartt's novel right now.
Read on only if you won't read the book and trust that none of your friends would ever murder you.
Simply because they were close friends. Too close of friends. The littlest things can pile up between close friends. And there are some things you prefer to not be known by others.
Ironically, Bunny's death is the very catalyst for their dark secrets to bubble up to the surface and explode. Without Bunny, their actions and mentalities become more unrestrained, unchained, and things. fall. apart.
So lesson learned. Don't rip your friends apart just because they know you too well, you won't be able to sleep at night anymore.
Will my spoiling the secrets of The Secret History keep you from reading the book? Trust me, these are the least important surprises that this book holds. I hope this review only entices you to embark on this haunting narrative of the snowballing mistakes a few kids made in search for a surreal experience. Because I guarantee you will experience one of your own through Tartt's evocative imagery and clever storytelling.
Fortunately, not one you'll regret.
"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." Richard Papen ― Donna Tartt, The Secret History (2004)
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