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.I chose this quote because it sums up my central complaint about this book: Could the plot or characters of The Secret History actually exist "outside of literature"? While I enjoyed it (for the most part) while reading, I never lost the sense that I was reading a work of fiction: It logically constructed a world that I accepted but couldn't escape into, and all along, I could feel the hand of Donna Tartt guiding me.
It isn't a spoiler to say what the plot of this book is (since it's revealed in the Prologue): A self-isolating group of six Classical scholars at a small New England liberal arts college murders one of their number and the narrator proceeds to describe the events leading up to the death and then its aftermath. I found the introduction to be chilling (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) and I was eager to have the mystery revealed (the whydunnit), but here's the thing -- the murder is set up to make logical sense, I agreed that he should be killed given the circumstances, I might even have done it myself, but after closing the book I thought, "Well, no I wouldn't. That might make sense in a book, but not in real life. We're talking murder."
In The Secret History, Tarrt repeatedly separates the events of the book from reality, starting with Richard Papen, an unreliable, compulsively lying narrator (think The Talented Mr. Ripley or Jay Gatsby) who is never really accepted into the main group of friends (so never knows what's actually going on) and adds vast amounts of drugs and alcohol (so that the narrator never has a sincere reaction to anything). As if the narrative circumstances of this disconnection aren't obvious enough, Tarrt constantly and overtly tells us: Richard sees the word like a painting (…[Francis looked like] an old-fashioned banker in a surrealist painting…it was like a painting too vivid to be real…the cloudy, radiant sky was right out of Constable…); or like a movie (…some complicated film…like a spy picture…like a film in fast motion…); or dreamlike (…a long bad dream…a nightmare…some lingering dyspeptic dream…); or déjà-vu-y (...images which did not seem so much theatrical or foreign as imbued with the indelible quality of memory, of experience lived…it had the quality of a memory; there it was, before my eyes, and yet too beautiful to believe …the ceilings had set off a ghostly echo, giving all that desperate hilarity the quality of a memory even as I sat listening to it, memories of things I'd never known). When the narrator is this disconnected from the action, when everything feels fictional to him as it's happening, it's very hard to buy in as the reader.
As for the characters, they were pretty much all unlikeable and not differentiated enough for me to keep them straight (I know that Charles is a twin, Francis is gay and Henry is an evil genius, but other than that, they read like the same guy), and really, other than being the only girl in the group, I couldn't see why Camilla would become Richard's life-long love -- they barely spent any time together. Richard himself, as the poor kid outsider, could have been an interesting foil to the rest if he hadn't been such a listless and disengaged character. If I had encountered this pompous, Greek-aphorism-dropping, stumbling drunk, tweed-wearing, insular group of old money twits when I was in University, I would have steered clear of them. While they may have thought themselves very clever and important, nothing they achieve ever justifies them getting away with murder.
In an afterword, Tartt explains how the structure of The Secret History (a book she started writing while still in college) is based on that of classical literature -- the murder being revealed in the beginning "is a very ancient way of telling a story, which is partly what makes it appropriate for this novel, but it is also a surprisingly effective tactic for building suspense", and I would agree with that -- this is quite a suspenseful book as it reveals the whydunnit. But the murder takes place on page 269 of a 559 page book (in my edition) and the aftermath involved a lot of overdrinking and people behaving strangely without explaining to the narrator what they were doing and thinking and the disconnection simply continued -- and continued for far too long (Tartt also explains that the manuscript she submitted was actually 1000 pages but the publisher shrank it with fonts and typesetting; this book is longer than it seems).
I enjoyed The Goldfinch much more than this, Tartt's first novel, but there were also many redemptive passages like this one (which includes the kind of punctuation that dazzles me):
Some things are too terrible to grasp at once. Other things - naked, sputtering, indelible in their horror - are too terrible to really grasp ever at all. It is only later, in solitude, in memory that the realization dawns: when the ashes are cold; when the mourners have departed; when one looks around and finds oneself - quite to one's surprise - in an entirely different world.This book wasn't a waste of my time by any means, but it did leave me wanting. As is my habit, I'll need to read Tartt's intermediate novel, The Little Friend, before I can figure out if I am a fan or not.
