Modern Classic or Self-Indulgent Slog:Donna Tartt’s The Secret History
The snow in the mountains was melting and Bunny had been dead for several weeks before we came to understand the gravity of the situation.
*
“How best to describe Donna Tartt’s enthralling first novel? Imagine the plot of Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment crossed with the story of Euripides’ Bacchae set against the backdrop of Bret Easton Ellis’s Rules of Attraction and told in the elegant, ruminative voice of Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited. The product, surprisingly enough, isn’t a derivative jumble, but a remarkably powerful novel that seems sure to win a lengthy stay on the best-seller lists.
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“Of course, many 19th-century writers—from Dickens to Dostoyevsky—used similarly melodramatic events to fuel their novels’ plots, but the moral resonance of such works is never achieved by The Secret History. Because Ms. Tartt’s characters are all such chilly customers, they do not so much lose their innocence as make a series of pragmatic, amoral decisions. As a result, real guilt and suffering do not occur in this novel; neither does redemption. The reader is simply left with a group portrait of the banality of evil.
As a ferociously well-paced entertainment, however, The Secret History succeeds magnificently. Forceful, cerebral and impeccably controlled, The Secret History achieves just what Ms. Tartt seems to have set out to do: it marches with cool, classical inevitability toward its terrible conclusion.”
–Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times, September 4, 1992
*
“The Secret History is an astonishing novel—and not merely an astonishing first novel. It is a mesmerizing story written with a control and style that captivated me from its first sentence: ‘The snow in the mountains was melting and Bunny had been dead for several weeks before we came to understand the gravity of the situation.’
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“Tartt reveals these details relatively early in the novel. What propels The Secret History are the tensions that emerge among the five survivors—and their fear that they’ll be caught. It speaks volumes about Tartt’s talent as a writer and storyteller that it is possible to care about these students despite the fact that they are shallow, snobbish and largely immoral.”
-Chris Bohjalian, The Burlington Free Press, September 20, 1992
*
“Donna Tartt’s first novel, The Secret History, is an odd confection. A highly readable murder mystery; a romantic dream of doomed youth and a disquisition on ancient and modern mores; all served up in a sugary, over-refined style that has already won Tartt a puzzling amount of media attention.
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“Throughout, one is uncomfortably aware that Tartt’s talents are not quite up to her intended effects. As she is unable to show us the joys of the rather dull times that Richard spends with the group, she tells us, with unnatural breathlessness … Her recourse to such poses at moments of emotional heat brings out the book’s lack of heart, its drably inhuman cast. Its flavour is less the charmed amorality of The Great Gatsby, more the cold lovelessness of Hitchcock’s Rope, a cool Forties number about two students who kill a colleague to prove their mettle.
But although she is too overwhelmed by her models—Scott Fitzgerald, primarily—to find her own voice, Tartt does show an impressive ability to pace and pattern her novel, keeping the plot tightly under control throughout the search for Bunny’s body, the funeral and the aftermath. And while her protagonists never escape their ghostly insubstantiality, she displays some searing observations of their social milieu that leap from the page.”
–Natasha Walter, The Independent, October 31, 1992
*
“It’s inevitable that Tartt will be compared to McInerney and Ellis, her contemporaries (and, in Ellis’ case, her close friend) in the claustrophobic world of 20-somethign American novelists, but she should not be lumped in with them—at least not yet. For one thing, The Secret History is a more ambitious debut than either Ellis or McInerney managed. And her story seems likely to endure long after the oh-so-’80s urban facades of Bright Lights, Big City or Less Than Zero have rendered those books dated and even incomprehensible.
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“For if we never quite warm to any of her barely post-adolescent Greek scholars—even Richard, the narrator, never comes sharply into focus—we can feel how lost they are, how scarily bankrupt the adult world on whose threshold they stand appears to them.
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“Tartt’s somber achievement is to capture the mind-set of a generation without moorings—one in which those who are pushed off a cliff in their youth seem to have got off easy.”
-Brian Dickerson, The Detroit Free Press, September 13, 1992
*
“The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale … By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80’s—and in Tartt’s strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.”
*
“…a huge (592 pages) rambling story that is sometimes ponderous, sometimes highly entertaining. Part psychological thriller, part chronicle of debauched, wasted youth, it suffers from a basically improbable plot, a fault Tartt often redeems through the bravado of her execution … her gifts for social satire and character analysis are shown to good advantage and her writing is powerful and evocative. On the other hand, the plot’s many inconsistencies, the self-indulgent, high-flown references to classic literature and the reliance on melodrama make one wish this had been a tauter, more focused novel.”
