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THE SECRET HISTORY

by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992

The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. 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.

Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992

ISBN: 1400031702

Page Count: 592

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992

LITERARY FICTION

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THINGS FALL APART

by Chinua Achebe ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 23, 1958

This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.

Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.

Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger .

Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958

ISBN: 0385474547

Page Count: 207

Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky

Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958

More by Chinua Achebe

by Chinua Achebe

THE EDUCATION OF A BRITISH-PROTECTED CHILD

HOUSE OF LEAVES

by Mark Z. Danielewski ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 6, 2000

The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and...

An amazingly intricate and ambitious first novel - ten years in the making - that puts an engrossing new spin on the traditional haunted-house tale.

Texts within texts, preceded by intriguing introductory material and followed by 150 pages of appendices and related "documents" and photographs, tell the story of a mysterious old house in a Virginia suburb inhabited by esteemed photographer-filmmaker Will Navidson, his companion Karen Green (an ex-fashion model), and their young children Daisy and Chad. The record of their experiences therein is preserved in Will's film The Davidson Record - which is the subject of an unpublished manuscript left behind by a (possibly insane) old man, Frank Zampano - which falls into the possession of Johnny Truant, a drifter who has survived an abusive childhood and the perverse possessiveness of his mad mother (who is institutionalized). As Johnny reads Zampano's manuscript, he adds his own (autobiographical) annotations to the scholarly ones that already adorn and clutter the text (a trick perhaps influenced by David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest ) - and begins experiencing panic attacks and episodes of disorientation that echo with ominous precision the content of Davidson's film (their house's interior proves, "impossibly," to be larger than its exterior; previously unnoticed doors and corridors extend inward inexplicably, and swallow up or traumatize all who dare to "explore" their recesses). Danielewski skillfully manipulates the reader's expectations and fears, employing ingeniously skewed typography, and throwing out hints that the house's apparent malevolence may be related to the history of the Jamestown colony, or to Davidson's Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of a dying Vietnamese child stalked by a waiting vulture. Or, as "some critics [have suggested,] the house's mutations reflect the psychology of anyone who enters it."

Pub Date: March 6, 2000

ISBN: 0-375-70376-4

Page Count: 704

Publisher: Pantheon

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2000

More by Mark Z. Danielewski

by Mark Z. Danielewski

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Review: The Secret History

More than twenty years after its release, Donna Tartt’s The Secret History continues to bewitch readers with the tale of a group of decadent Classics students at an elite Vermont college in the 1980s – and for good reason. The novel’s first scene is that of a group of friends, including nineteen-year-old narrator Richard Papen, driving back to Hampden College after murdering a friend and classmate. The rest of the novel is a breathtakingly poised explanation of how the murder was allowed to happen (for this reason, The Secret History has been described as a ‘whydunnit’), and its devastating effects on the characters.

The greatest draw of The Secret History is alluded to in the title. “This is the only story I will ever be able to tell”, Richard claims in the prologue; immediately we see how Tartt’s skill is in giving the reader the impression that they are being let in on an enormous secret. This is in spite of a cast of characters who teeter constantly on the verge of lapsing into caricatures of spoilt liberal arts students, and Richard’s self-confessed tendency to lie with exceptional conviction. It is Richard’s ability to play fast and loose with the truth that allows him to ingratiate himself with a small group of eccentric Classics students and their mercurial professor, Julian Morrow: he casts aside his humble origins in small-town California and invents a past filled with expensive boarding schools and oil-tycoon parents to fit in with his affluent classmates. These classmates are wonderfully observed: the Macaulay twins, clad in white; Henry Winter, an orphaned linguistic genius from Missouri; Edmund ‘Bunny’ Corcoran, a brash financier’s son run to seed. It is a considerable feat for Tartt to present us with this cast of curious and dishonest characters, and yet make it utterly believable when the group tells Papen of how a Bacchanal they undertook in rural Vermont ended in tragedy.

As he is not included in the group’s efforts to reach the state of ecstasy found in the Greek cult of Dionysos, god of wine and sensual pleasure, Richard is the perfect guide for the reader as both try to understand what possessed four well-to-do students to pursue such a state of hedonistic delirium. Here, The Secret History owes a lot to Euripides’s tragedy The Bacchae , which dwells on the dangers of cultivating an ordered mind at the expense of the sensual revelry of Dionysian ritual. As the novel progresses, the order of Greek lessons is replaced by various practices – alcoholism, incest, prescription drug abuse – that the characters use to shield themselves from the evil that they committed with a chilling calm. This, of course, is the tragic irony of the work: in their efforts to respond to their own depraved Bacchic actions in a rational manner, the students find themselves drawn towards a different kind of escape, one that reveals the horrifying banality of evil. There is plenty for students of Classics to enjoy here, including allusions to Sophocles, Homer and Plato, but there is more than enough for those with no knowledge of the subject to enjoy the novel. Indeed, a significant part of the novel’s attraction is its exploration of why, despite their practical obsolescence and esoteric nature, we continue to hold dead languages in a high regard. Richard’s ‘morbid longing for the picturesque’ is something with which Oxford students, reading in ancient colleges and libraries, can surely identify, regardless of their field of study.

I read this book on the recommendation of friends, all of whom remarked that it is a book perhaps best enjoyed before the end of school, when one does not have one’s own idea of the realities of university life. There is certainly something in this: the nitty-gritty of academic life is never really at the forefront of this book, and students reading this during their own university experience might grow impatient with the self-indulgence the characters exhibit. Reading it immediately after the end of term, however, proved immensely rewarding: one is more tolerant of Tartt’s romanticised take on life at an elite university, and there is more time to dwell on the brilliant pitch and pace of Tartt’s prose. The Secret History is probably a little too long to justify reading for pleasure during term time, but when read during the vac, its depiction of life amid the stunning surroundings of an elite university will haunt student readers long after their return to Oxford.

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University Libraries Blog

Book review: the secret history by donna tartt.

Written by Benjamin Clanton, Government Publications

The coming of age tale has long held an important and cherished place in American literature, and the college novel has taken this genre to complex heights in the past several decades. Donna Tartt’s The Secret History is arguably one of the best examples in recent memory, as it examines both the seductive and alienating aspects of the modern campus. Richard Papen, the main character and narrator, flees an unfulfilling existence in California for the small and exclusive environs of Hampden College in Vermont. There, he soon falls in with a small group of Classics students: stoic and brilliant Henry; the enigmatic twins Charles and Camilla; neurotic Francis; and oafish Bunny. Their elitist instructor, Julian, leads them in the search of beauty and knowledge, creating a bubble that exists on the edges of the school. On the surface, it appears to be a dream existence for all of them; however, a series of tragedies shows that dreams never last, and the real world always brings a harsh reckoning.

Richard remains an outsider through much of the book, despite becoming part of the group and forming close relationships with the others; he shows shame concerning his background, creating fabrications or withholding details about his past in California. Bunny, in particular, tends to needle him for being different from the rest of them, constantly cracking jokes about things concerning Richard’s past that do not add up. Bunny, in his interactions with the rest of the group, is unable to realize that things which are just a game to him are of the utmost seriousness to the others, causing constant mental strain that eventually forces a disastrous break.

The social dynamics of the group create both a unique sense of comradery and constant tensions that build up over time. The members largely come from some form of affluent background, save Richard, and already have a skewed idea of how the world works. Julian, their teacher and talisman of sorts, is independently wealthy and thus separated from the world around him in many ways. Richard even observes that the rest of the group seem disdainful of what is going on in the larger world in regards to politics and other current events. The group is also barely aware of their community beyond the Classics courses, which is already a tight nit and exclusive liberal arts college attached to a small New England community. All of this creates a sense of elitism, especially in Henry. He is content with becoming lost within the Greek translations Julian assigns, or some other literary or artistic pursuit that he alone understands or has interest in. He cuts himself off in numerous ways from everyone, including his closest friends, though we do get glimpses of humanity from him, especially when it concerns Julian.

The class and the group become their entire world. Some take it more seriously than others. It is arguable that Bunny takes nothing seriously, that life is a series of games and jokes and the only thing of importance to him is the fulfillment of base desire. Charles, Camilla, and Francis often seem along for the ride, in search of some form of comradery in a world they do not feel connected to. However, Henry, like Julian, is a true believer, though they are possibly searching for different things to believe in. Julian is clearly drawn to beauty, whatever that may mean; he finds most things in the larger world ugly and vulgar. Henry, with his youthful obsessions, seems to be searching for some form of truth that he cannot find, and most likely does not exist. The others often fall in lockstep with him, which leads them down a road of destruction and madness. And then there is Richard, who just wants to find something that matters, and clings to that idea for as long as possible until it shatters like everything else. Perhaps that is why he moves forward slightly better than the others. Despite his deceptions of who he truly is, to the others and to himself, perhaps being that type of nobody, the type of person that can shift identities as a situation necessitates, allows him to drift through the world without being consumed by its many tribulations.

Ultimately, Richard and the rest of the group are just kids, college students trying to find their way in the world. It is possible that Julian does them a disservice by cutting them off from the rest of the college’s community; he sees this as a positive and the best way for them to learn, but the subsequent isolation and loneliness eventually accelerates their deterioration. Bunny and Richard do a moderately better job in remaining connected to other people. However, Henry, Charles, Camilla, and Francis become trapped in a kind of echo chamber, stranded with each other and, often, inside their own heads. They are the ones that were in the forest the night of the local farmer’s death, which begins the group’s cataclysmic fall; they are the ones that act as the driving force for the climactic event of the novel; and they are the ones that ultimately suffer the most in the end. Richard does as well, of course, but in a different way. He always seems to be the one that is completely afloat, never fully becoming part of the tight band of friends. The others are completely aware of what came before Richard and their fateful Bacchanal. After that ideal falls apart, they are unable to find anything to hold on to and cannot deal properly with the guilt of what they have done.

I did not read this book when I was college student. I read it several years after finishing graduate school, and reread it recently, which prompted this blog post. I cannot say for sure if it would have been a positive or negative force for me at that point in life. It is easy to become lost in the Romantic aspects of the plot: the closeness of the main characters; their experiences with good books and good food; and being young and beautiful in a place that allows escape into a world of deceptively few consequences. However, this can blind the reader to all the negative aspects of that world that Tartt skillfully uncovers: the strange solitude and self-isolation, even when surrounded by so many potentially likeminded people, and the odd unreality of being stuck between youth and adulthood. One of the driving forces of the novel is that when young, one is often shocked into realizing life and its many decisions have actual consequences. Tartt’s characters, including Julian, the primary example of ‘adulthood,’ become trapped in a dreamlike revelry, and, when yanked out of it, must deal with this fact. As they discover, you rarely come out of the other side of these situations the same person, and sometimes, you do not come out of the other side at all.

Library promotion time! The 3 rd and 4 th floor stacks are back open for the fall semester. However, if you have reservations about browsing these areas or getting a book from upstairs, McWherter Library is still offering an Item Pickup Request service; you can find the online form here . Our workers in the Circulation Department will pull the book and notify you once it is ready for checkout. Remember: please be wearing your mask and have your University of Memphis ID card ready in order to get into the library. And most importantly: stay safe and healthy!

If you want to read The Secret History by Donna Tartt, it is currently available for checkout at McWherter Library and can be checked out using the Pickup Request service.

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New Times, New Thinking.

Donna Tartt’s The Secret History at 30

How a bestselling debut novel about a group of murderous students became a cult classic.

By Nick Burns

“Genuine beauty is always alarming”: such is the conviction of the Greek professor in Donna Tartt’s The Secret History , which was published 30 years ago this month. Hardly alarming, though, was the arrival of Tartt’s debut. The book was subject to a bidding war in 1991 and much anticipated before its release. The qualms of a few reviewers (the characters were not “entirely plausible”, it was a novel “not really about the glamour of evil, but the glamour of glamour”) proved insufficient to prevent its immediate installation as a “modern classic”, as the latest edition’s back cover proclaims. Tartt was 29 when the novel was published (Alfred A Knopf bought the rights for $450,000). The Secret History has maintained a cult following ever since: one bar in Manhattan’s East Village has even wallpapered its bathroom with pages from the book.

Tartt’s fictional professor, Julian Morrow, teaches at a small college in Vermont that serves as a somewhat new-agey repository for wayward children of wealthy families – not unlike Bennington College, where Tartt was a student in the 1980s (she had transferred from the University of Mississippi, her home state). Morrow acquires a small, tight-knit clique of students whose aristocratic tastes set them apart from their peers.

Thinking they are enacting the vision Morrow has set out for them, the group pursues a different kind of Bacchic ritual from the more pedestrian drug- and sex-fuelled college parties of their classmates. Fasting for days and setting out to find Dionysus in the Vermont countryside, they come to their senses to realise they have murdered a local farmer. The rest of the novel proceeds from the cover-up, which draws in a recent admittee to the group: the narrator, Richard Papen.

[See also: Ian McEwan and the mess of living ]

The Secret History is not a novel of ideas – its primary interest is not in how charismatic professors engage in the trafficking of ideas, dangerous or otherwise, and how they can be put to good or bad use. It is rather a novel about the wonders and dangers of friendship. Morrow himself takes up relatively little space in the novel – if he approves of his students’ Dionysian explorations, he does nothing to prompt them, nor does he involve himself in the horrors that follow.

The Saturday Read

Morning call.

The focus is rather on the group itself, and at first on the charming, intellectual companionship it provides. Set off against a backdrop of more familiar Eighties and Nineties youth hedonism – which would supply Tartt’s Bennington classmate Bret Easton Ellis, to whom the novel is dedicated, with much of his material – the group appears as an anachronism, as if its members are role-playing as characters in Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited long after the world depicted in that novel had passed into dust.

Perhaps the theatrical discomfort the story’s characters display in regard to their own time has helped the novel itself endure. Follow-up books spaced a decade apart, The Little Friend (2002) and The Goldfinch (2013), reprised the formula of the first success (a crime foretold at the outset, then traced in circuitous, dogged fashion throughout) with diminishing effect, without seeming to lessen the appeal of Tartt’s debut. The Secret History feels far less dated today than The Goldfinch , which among various failings seems positively sticky with the cloying sentimentality of the early 2010s.

At first glance the prose style seems a stark contrast with that in vogue today. Where many contemporary novels are written in stripped-down, impersonal language, Tartt lavishes her story with descriptions of dress, expression and character in a manner almost Victorian. Detailed descriptions of Greek exercises seem self-indulgent. And the narration occasionally becomes discursive, especially at moments of dramatic climax (the narrator goes so far as to apologise for this when it is time to describe the book’s second murder). But a closer look reveals an austerity behind the appearance of plenty, like the cold winter that follows every lush Vermont summer. This was not lost on the early reviewers, who noted that no detail is incidental in Tartt’s novel – each observation is calibrated to move the plot a step closer to its conclusion.

Papen, the narrator of The Secret History , comes from a lower-middle-class background in California, something that distinguishes him from the others in the group. After his inhospitably suburban upbringing (described only vaguely), the Greek group is a godsend. The most genuinely felt portions of the novel are those that bear witness to the narrator’s deep gratitude to the group for including him in their circle, and the lasting traces that their influence leaves on him.

The novel was written at the apex of neoliberalism, an age preoccupied by a sense of disintegrating social ties. The essay that led to Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone , which surveyed the collapse of traditional social bonds in America, came out within a few years of The Secret History . The bonds between individuals that did emerge in such an atmosphere were often painted in darker shades: consider Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club (1996), whose narrator can seem a lower-brow version of Tartt’s – plagued by insomnia, seeking consolation through a clandestine group bonded through violence.

Tartt’s trajectory to Bennington – by way of a public university in Mississippi and a petty-bourgeois Southern background – was as unlikely as her narrator’s. According to one investigation of the college’s 1980s dynamics, she, like her narrator, tried to enter a clique of students associated with a charismatic classics professor named Claude Fredericks.

[See also: From spy to journalist to celebrated poet: the curious life of Basil Bunting ]

“I suppose there is a certain crucial interval in everyone’s life when character is fixed forever,” Richard Papen tells us: the line is pulled nearly verbatim from Tartt’s 1986 Bennington commencement address. For both author and narrator, this interval was the period spent in a strange society, half a dozen strong, a little island within the island of a tiny college of rich Ivy League rejects in the Vermont countryside. In the novel, it turns out the group’s most important rituals are not Bacchic but quotidian, and that unlike most students they live a surprisingly regimented life – full of trips to country houses, and Sunday-night dinners.

“I was surprised by how easily they managed to incorporate me into their cyclical, Byzantine existence,” Papen says. He is shy yet formidable – realising belatedly how what he took to be awkwardness or taciturnity appeared to others as hostility or scorn – a type of person who often finds true inclusion in a group of friends especially gratifying. But such small and tight-knit groups that derive their habits from their own inclinations and studies, rather than from broader social customs, are often especially hostile to dissent within their own ranks.

Such is the case with Bunny Corcoran, the most straightforwardly prep-handbook character of the group and the one whom the rest conspire to murder after he threatens to reveal the secret of the first killing. (The first sentence of the novel is: “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.”) Bunny is cruel: a terrible student in Greek who can hardly spell, his chief talent is in finding each group member’s sore spots and prodding them.

He taunts the narrator by asking him in public if his ties are designer-made, then, after the narrator avows that they are, grabbing them and turning them over to reveal their “humble origin”. He makes dark jokes about the relationship between the two twins in the group, a boy and a girl, and these taunts are also eventually shown to have truth behind them. And more than anything else, he is tormented by the evil deed the others have done in killing the farmer in their Bacchic ritual and trying to get away with it. This baffles the rest of the characters: he had never shown any trace of a strongly entrenched sense of morality up to that point.

The group murders Bunny ostensibly to keep him quiet. But the narrator reveals an additional motive for his part in the killing: the thousand humiliations Bunny dealt him; the others seem to have felt much the same. In the end the first murder, of the farmer, hardly matters in motivating the second – in fact, since we are only ever told of the first murder indirectly, we are even entitled to believe that it never actually happened.

[See also: Why Gone with the Wind is American culture’s original sin ]

What matters is that Bunny, unpleasant and wretched as he is, finds that his loyalty to his friends cannot trump the moral instinct that he has been lent by society. As individuals and as a group, he judges his friends by rules other than their own. For that, they murder him.

It would be easy to think of The Secret History as a novel in the fashion of The Great Gatsby , which Tartt’s narrator tells us is his favourite book. Tartt’s novel, like Fitzgerald’s, seems to feature a naive young man from the American west whose optimism comes to grief amid the ruthless, cynical corruption of the east. But on closer inspection it is Bunny, the consummate easterner, who appears as the sole moral force in Tartt’s book, however ignorant, prejudiced and doomed.

At least a part of the novel’s continuing readership is drawn by a middlebrow appreciation for the trappings, rather than the substance, of intellectual life. This aspect of the book has proven susceptible to transformation into an “aesthetic” with mass cultural appeal – the New York Times commented in 2020 on a trend on TikTok, “dark academia”, that touted styles and poses derived from a reading of Tartt’s book.

But a fair portion of its readership may come too from the desire to experience, vicariously, the same feeling of inclusion in such a circle as it depicts. Tartt’s characters take the world of Waugh’s Brideshead as a model for their tastes, attire, manner of speaking, and The Secret History offers an invitation into a select society devoted to this kind of re-enactment. In this way the reader becomes a Richard Papen, too – the outsider, tempted by the group.

With a recent tendency towards hedonism and the defence of aristocracy in certain cultural precincts of New York City, not to mention a faddish penchant for Catholicism, one might expect that Tartt – a practising Roman Catholic – would be poised for a revival. But so far the ringleaders of the Manhattan scene have been more drawn to her former classmate, Bret Easton Ellis, whose characters tend to have simpler desires. This is likely in part because Tartt’s effete characters offer little to a clique intent on rehabilitating a traditional, dominant masculinity against its “woke” critics.

But perhaps at bottom it is because Bunny emerges in spite of himself as the novel’s tragic hero – the individual who betrays the group on behalf of society, the Brutus who puts the republic before his sons. Today’s Manhattan crowd, in contrast, at times seems convinced that their outsider status ought to make them off-limits for criticism. Both the New York avant-garde and the members of the cult of The Secret History who idolise its characters might consider the novel’s suggestion that groups of outsiders, too, are subject to the laws of nature and of society. Every classics student knows that for Aristotle, the man outside the city is no man at all. He is either a god or an animal.

The Secret History: 30th anniversary edition

By Donna Tartt Penguin Books Ltd, £20

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This article appears in the 07 Sep 2022 issue of the New Statesman, Liz Truss Unchained

Donna Tartt’s “The Secret History” as Revenge Fantasy

Brooke clark situates donna tartt’s first novel, “the secret history,” in the long, august history of burn books., by brooke clark december 7, 2021.

Is Donna Tartt’s first novel, The Secret History , actually an incredibly elaborate and sophisticated burn book — an act of literary revenge against those she felt disrespected her in college?

That’s the impression created by Lili Anolik’s podcast, Once Upon a Time … at Bennington College , which exposes the dense, elusive matrix at the root of art, the place where real life and fiction intermingle. (Anolik also wrote the 2019 Esquire article “ The Secret Oral History of Bennington .”) Through interviews with people who attended Bennington in the early 1980s, she paints a portrait of Tartt as an insecure transfer student from Ole Miss who quickly became fascinated by classics professor Claude Fredericks and the three senior Greek students surrounding him: Todd O’Neal, Matt Jacobsen, and Paul McGloin.

Tartt wasn’t a part of their Greek class, but she remedies this in the novel by having her narrator, Richard Papen, help the classics students out with a tricky Greek homework assignment. With a quickness that somewhat strains believability, Richard is invited into the class and their inner circle. But there’s a faint aura of wish fulfilment about this. According to Anolik’s interviews, Tartt worked her way into the Bennington classics group by another route: becoming Paul McGloin’s girlfriend. This clearly caused some awkwardness. Talking about Tartt, O’Neal sounds more puzzled than anything else, describing her as “evasive” and “impenetrable.” But Jacobsen seems to have genuinely disliked her. He calls Tartt “a Miss Buttinsky” and compares her, melodramatically, to Yoko Ono, saying she’d decided “if she couldn’t be a part of our tight group, she would destroy it.”

This hostility accounts for the element of revenge in Tartt’s transformation of the members of the Greek class into their fictional alter egos. Todd O’Neal, with whom she seems to have had a strained though not outright antagonistic relationship, becomes Henry Winter, the cold (notice his symbolic surname), emotionally stunted linguistic genius who is the star of the Greek class. Matt Jacobsen, the most openly hostile to her, becomes Bunny Corcoran, the cruel, messy, unintelligent student who will be murdered by his own supposed closest friends at the end of the novel’s first half. And Claude Fredericks, the professor whose class she couldn’t join, becomes Julian Morrow, a hollow poseur who, when the crimes of his students are revealed, simply flees from the consequences of his own teachings — the ultimate moral coward.

The information in Anolik’s podcast reveals the straightforward literary payback at the heart of The Secret History . And in particular, knowing about the tension between Tartt and Jacobsen illuminates one of the novel’s most brilliant aspects: its treatment of the murder victim. The novel’s opening paragraphs reveal that Bunny will be killed, and so we are primed to have some sympathy for him. But Tartt goes against the grain of our expectations, making Bunny the most unlikeable character in the book. He constantly makes cruel, class-based jokes at Richard’s expense, which perhaps mirror Jacobsen’s treatment of Tartt. He also displays a narcissism so all-consuming that he is incapable of even imagining the feelings of others. At one point he steals a cheesecake marked “Please do not steal. I am on financial aid” from a dorm refrigerator and devours it, all the while complaining that it is “too lemony” — a remarkably powerful scene that renders Bunny utterly repellent to the reader. It’s as if one of the book’s chief artistic purposes is to make us cheer on the murder of a character based on a person Tartt herself couldn’t stand.

This could seem like a reductive way to read The Secret History — but is the novel lessened by the fact that it is a burn book?

Burn books have their own long, august, not entirely secret literary history. The ancient Greek poet Archilochus wrote a series of burn poems against Lycambes, who had supposedly agreed to let his daughter Neoboule marry Archilochus, then changed his mind. The fragmentary state of the poems makes their effectiveness difficult to judge, but ancient scholars claimed that Archilochus’s invective was so harsh that Lycambes and his daughters all hanged themselves. A handful of Catullus’s poems could be read as a miniature burn book of Clodia, or whoever the model for Lesbia actually was; presumably she would have been recognizable in her time. Most significantly, perhaps, Procopius’s The Secret History , from which Tartt took her title, is basically a burn book aimed at the emperor Justinian and his wife Theodora.

English literature too is rich in burn poems, like Dryden’s Mac Flecknoe (attacking rival dramatist Thomas Shadwell), Byron’s The Vision of Judgment (attacking poet laureate Robert Southey) and Shelley’s Peter Bell the Third (attacking Wordsworth). And Pope’s Dunciad is probably the greatest literary burn book in English: an epic that mocks every poet and critic Pope despised one by one, until finally crowning poet laureate Colley Cibber as the king of the dunces. (Poet laureates are frequent victims, presumably because poets are a poisonously envious crew who naturally reserve their severest burns for colleagues whom they consider undeservedly successful.) Ironically, time has made The Dunciad an encyclopedia of the otherwise forgotten — Pope’s condemnation has conferred immortality on his targets.

Saying that Tartt’s novel belongs in this tradition doesn’t undermine it. Obviously, artists transform the raw material that inspires their work, but they are often hesitant to speak honestly about the extent to which negative emotions can serve as inspiration for art. Tartt herself has denied links between her characters and real people, a claim severely undercut by Anolik’s podcast, and one that does a disservice to her own achievement. Most people have felt the way Tartt felt at Bennington as some point in their lives — the recognition of ourselves in Richard is part of what makes the book work. But hardly anyone could turn that feeling into The Secret History . In fact, anger, hatred, and envy are excellent spurs to creation, and always have been. Saying Tartt’s anger at being excluded partly inspired her novel does nothing to diminish her work, but simply places it in its true light.

Brooke Clark is the author of the poetry collection Urbanities , book reviews editor at Able Muse , and the editor of the online epigrams journal The Asses of Parnassus . Twitter: @thatbrookeclark

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The Secret History turns 30: the enduring cult appeal of Donna Tartt’s campus novel

Why has no one made ‘the secret history’ into a film and does donna tartt really take her pet pugs everywhere three decades since it was published, katie rosseinsky looks at the novel’s legacy.

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‘The Secret History’, Donna Tartt’s cult classic novel, turns 30

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T he snow in the mountains was melting and Bunny had been dead for several weeks before we came to understand the gravity of our situation.” The Secret History haunts you from its very first sentence. At the start of Donna Tartt’s debut novel, which turns 30 this month, we’re queasily aware that something unspeakable has happened. There’s a “body at the bottom of the ravine with a clean break in the neck”. A death that has prompted “one of the biggest manhunts in Vermont history”. How did it come to this?

It’s a literary beginning that has lost none of its power over the past three decades, and neither has Tartt’s book. Since its release in 1992, the novel has sold more than 2.3 million copies in English alone, and her work has been translated into 40 languages. The book’s cult appeal is only growing stronger. Gen Z has adopted the author as the originator of “dark academia”, the moody literary aesthetic that is wildly popular on TikTok (all sepia-toned shots of dreaming spires… and plaid, lots of it). Her story also chimes with “the current resurgence of Greek mythology retellings” in the industry too, says book publicist Emily Goulding (think Madeline Miller’s The Song of Achilles , another BookTok favourite, or Pat Barker’s The Silence of the Girls ).

Tartt’s own enigmatic persona certainly hasn’t hurt her book’s mystique. Her rise is the stuff of literary legend. She started writing while studying at the very Hampden-esque Bennington College in Vermont alongside literary enfant terrible turned full-time millennial-basher Bret Easton Ellis; here, she took Classics lessons from the Morrow-alike professor Claude Fredericks. The literary world was soon ablaze with anticipation: after a fierce bidding war, The Secret History sold to publishers Alfred A Knopf for a staggering $450,000, a deal brokered by Tartt’s powerhouse agent, Amanda “Binky” Urban. It was published when she was just 28 (before that, Knopf reportedly had to print a second round of advance copies for press, so feverish was the demand).

Somewhere between a campus novel and a thriller, the 600-odd pages of Tartt’s “whydunnit” are propelled by unease, dread and recrimination. Richard Papen, the Nick Carraway-ish narrator, arrives at Hampden College on financial aid, amid a sea of wealthy, druggy students. He’s instantly enthralled by a group of Classicists who keep themselves well apart from their peers (aided by their insistence on littering conversations with Greek and Latin). Eventually, he’s inducted into their coterie: there is Henry, the de facto leader and “linguistic genius”, Francis, “the most exotic of the set’’, twins Charles and Camilla, and the ill-fated Bunny, WASP-y and brash. All of them are acolytes of charismatic Classics professor Julian Morrow, who only accepts a handful of pupils into his class each year. “I hope we’re all ready to leave the phenomenal world and enter into the sublime?” he asks, the high priest of his own tiny cult.

Every cult, of course, has its rituals – and this is where things take a turn, first bacchanalian, then deadly. The weeks after Bunny’s murder, when Henry and co attempt to carry on as normal but find their lives suffused with paranoia, are a sustained exercise in suspense. “There are very few novelists that can keep a book taut for 650 pages,” says Jess Farr-Cox, lecturer in English at the University of Bristol. “It’s so clever to be able to do that, particularly when there’s no kind of ambiguity about who died, or how. You’re in possession of the facts, so really there shouldn’t be any tension at all. And yet she manages to keep it so tense. It’s extraordinary for a debut novel.”

By the time of Bunny’s death, we’re too far gone, way too drunk on the group’s weird glamour to judge. Richard’s fatal flaw, he notes at the outset, is “a morbid longing for the picturesque at all costs”. He has a tendency to aestheticise his friends, elevating their actions from the stuff of murky potboiler to Greek tragedy. Even after the murder, he can still barely believe that they have chosen him as one of the elect (is it possible to be flattered into complicity?). The book inspires devotion similarly, by letting us into the inner world of an elite: reading it feels a bit like being let in on a horrible piece of hearsay that you definitely shouldn’t know about, but have to listen to all the same.

It would go on to spend 30 weeks at the top of The New York Times bestseller list, while various myths about the writer started to take seed – some the result of her own self-fashioning, others speculation. She had a recording of TS Eliot as her answerphone message, one Vanity Fair interview claimed. Another story had her reading Ezra Pound cantos in the canteen at college; another, taking her pet pugs everywhere she went.

You’re in possession of the facts, so really there shouldn’t be any tension at all. And yet she manages to keep it so tense

Elsewhere, in a 1992 essay for Harper’s magazine, Tartt painted a picture of a southern gothic childhood “submerged in a pretty powerful altered state of consciousness”, thanks to her great-grandfather’s insistence that she take codeine for her “bad tonsils”. And then there was her image: the sleek, angular black bob, cut to recall the Jazz Age actress Louise Brooks; the unfussy, androgynous shirts and suits. “I think she’s cultivated that deliberately, the way she gets photographed,” Farr-Cox notes. “She looks incredible, but she gets photographed in this very enigmatic [way], often black and white, perfect hair, the very tailored, very understated, elegant clothes. I think that’s part of [the persona] as well.”

Yet all the attention, Tartt said in one interview published just a few months after the book’s release, was like “this glaring light turned into your face” – it made her feel “like I’m a criminal”. And so after The Secret History ’s publicity blitz, Tartt retreated. For the best part of a decade, she didn’t take on interviews or attend literary galas, and though her reputation as a recluse may have been exaggerated (“You can’t be Salinger and be represented by ICM,” as Easton Ellis once sharply put it), it’s hard to imagine a debut author doing a fast one like that now. It’s difficult “to make it onto anybody’s radar without any social presence” in the present literary landscape, Goulding notes. That’s especially true for first-timers, who are often buoyed by “bookstagrammers and bloggers” who are “huge cheerleaders for debuts”.

There were more rumours to come – she’d had a breakdown! She’d bought a private island! – but Tartt had in fact settled into a now notorious routine, re-emerging with a doorstopper of a book every 10 years or so ( The Little Friend arrived in 2002, followed by The Goldfinch in 2013). “I can’t think of anything worse than having to turn out a book every year,” she told The Guardian ahead of the release of The Little Friend . “It would be hell.”

The fact that The Secret History has never reached the screen hasn’t dimmed the novel’s appeal

That slow output has further fed the myth of a capital “A” author who writes into notebooks with coloured pencils, stapling note cards into the pages (a painstaking process recounted in a 2013 interview with the Irish Independent ). Imagining her typing into a Google Doc does, admittedly, feel faintly sacrilegious. All these stories, anecdotes and quotes have conspired to create a public persona that intrigues us as much as it tries to drive us away. That’s the paradox of being famous for being private, surely – still, Tartt remains fiercely protective of her personal life. Her legal team recently sent warning letters to the creator of a podcast about her time at Bennington (which inevitably created a wave of interest in the podcast and its contents).

The fact that The Secret History has never reached the screen hasn’t dimmed the novel’s appeal: the story of the various Hollywood attempts to take on Tartt’s novel is a saga of starry names and discarded scripts that only bolsters the book’s legend. Warner Brothers acquired the rights in 1992, with Alan J Pakula, the Oscar-nominated producer of To Kill A Mockingbird and director of All The President’s Men , overseeing the film’s development.

Joan Didion and her husband John Gregory Dunne were hired to tackle the screenplay, and if the combination of Tartt and Didion sounds too good to be true, rest assured it really was. Pakula was never happy with the couple’s efforts, and after he died in a car crash in 1998, the project was shelved. At some point, playwright Christopher Hampton (the two-time Oscar-winner who has adapted the likes of Les Liaisons Dangereuses , The Father and Atonement ) was brought on board, along with director Scott Hicks. And then… nothing.

In 2002, Gwyneth Paltrow and her brother Jake revealed that they’d struck a deal to develop an adaptation with Miramax, in an announcement that coincided with The Little Friend ’s publication. She would produce, he would direct. “This is a fabulous project that I fell in love with as soon as I read it,” Miramax’s Harvey Weinstein, then at the peak of his industry power in the wake of Shakespeare in Love , said at the time. Would Gwyneth have played Camilla? It’s not hard to imagine her breezing through Hampden College, chilly and patrician in an all-white costume, somewhere between Margot Tenenbaum and Marge Sherwood, but her production never even reached the casting stage. When the Paltrows’ father Bruce died later that year, they dropped their plans, and the film rights are thought to have since reverted to Tartt.

Nicole Kidman as Mrs Barbour and Ansel Elgort as Theo Decker in ‘The Goldfinch’

Later, there was talk of a TV drama, which would intriguingly be helmed by her Bennington classmates Easton Ellis and Melissa Rosenberg, but the series never materialised. Television, with its growing ability to command huge budgets and draw A-list talent behind and in front of the camera, now feels like the best medium for Tartt’s story – “unless it was given space in which to breathe and expand, I don’t think [a film] would work,” Farr-Cox says. “That sense of tension – spread that over a 12-week series and it’s much more powerful than just sitting in the cinema biting your nails for three hours.”

Beguiling as the idea may be, an on-screen Secret History will most likely remain as one of pop culture’s biggest might-have-beens. Tartt was seemingly burnt by the process of turning The Goldfinch , her most recent novel, into a film. A few years before its release, a Page Six splash claimed that she was unhappy with the rights deal, having apparently hoped for a producer credit and a chance to write the screenplay; this dissatisfaction, they said, prompted her to part ways with longtime agent Urban. Then came the flurry of middling to poor reviews, as if to cement her disenchantment with Hollywood: The Independent ’s critic Clarisse Loughrey described it as a “disastrous translation” of the novel , while Empire suggested “you might have more fun watching a pigeon for 149 minutes”. Its Rotten Tomatoes score currently sits at an unenviable 25 per cent.

Still, while dream-casting her debut is a nice exercise in conjecture (Timothée Chalamet? Anya Taylor-Joy?), 30 years on, a Secret History adaptation feels almost superfluous to requirements. “Readers,” Tartt has said, “really participate in the writing of a book”, and so much of that process can be lost when a story is transferred to film. “Live forever” is the students’ motto. Tartt’s novel will have no problem doing that all on its own.

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The Literary Edit

Review: The Secret History – Donna Tartt

In amongst the BBC’s Big Read ‘s overwhelming list of classics are a few hidden contemporary gems, of which Donna Tart’s The Secret History is one of the most compelling. I was interning at John Murray Publishers shortly after graduating and asked the girls with whom I was working what their favourite books were; The Secret History was mentioned and having seen it on the BBC’s Big Read I bought myself a copy.

The Secret History is a rare find: both intelligent and complex, the well-drawn characters and an effortless writing style create an evocative and informed read. Set against the Gothic backdrop of a college in Vermont, the novel follows a close knit circle of six Classics students whose lives begin to mirror that of the Greek Tragedies they are studying. A detective story of sorts, The Secret History is narrated by one of the six students, Richard Papen, who reflects, years later, on the situation that led to a murder within the group, the murder being confessed at the outset of the novel but the events otherwise revealed sequentially.

Beautiful and claustrophobic, the frequent references to Greek Mythology lend an air of antiquation to the student’s warped world of academia. The eccentric characters who form the heart of the novel, and the horrific secret they are hiding lead to an irrevocable trail of deceit and destruction; one from which they may never recover.

The Secret History has all the ingredients of a modern day classic – an elegant plot, intimately composed characters and a baroque undertone that is consistent and sinister. This psychological thriller truly deserves its place among the greats in the BBC’s Big Read and it’s easy to see why many cite it as one of their all time favourite reads.

About The Secret History

Under the influence of their charismatic classics professor, a group of clever, eccentric misfits at an elite New England college discover a way of thinking and living that is a world away from the humdrum existence of their contemporaries. But when they go beyond the boundaries of normal morality they slip gradually from obsession to corruption and betrayal, and at last – inexorably – into evil.

About Donna Tartt

Donna Tartt was born in Greenwood, Mississippi, and is a graduate of Bennington College. She is the author of the novels The Secret History, The Little Friend, and The Goldfinch, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction 2014.

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Books of The Times; Students Indulging In Course of Destruction

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By Michiko Kakutani

Sept. 4, 1992

The Secret History By Donna Tartt 524 pages. Alfred A. Knopf. $23.

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.

Ms. Tartt -- a Bennington classmate of Mr. Ellis and the novelist Jill Eisenstadt -- began "The Secret History" some eight years ago as a student, and the novel takes place at a small Vermont college in the 1980's. Its main characters, however, have less in common with most of their contemporaries than with the bright young things of England immortalized by Waugh and Nancy Mitford: the willful esthetes, dedicated to the ideals of beauty and art, who flocked around Harold Acton and Brian Howard at Oxford in the 1920's. They are glimpsed through the eyes of Ms. Tartt's narrator, Richard Papen, a scholarship student from California, who looks at his wealthy, snobbish schoolmates with a combination of envy, awe and an outsider's detachment.

Ashamed of his family's blue-collar roots, Richard decides to invent a new identity for himself at Hampden College. He erases the gas station where his father worked and the tract house he grew up in, and replaces them with a fictional Californian youth: swimming pools, orange groves and dissolute show-biz parties. He spends his meager savings on designer clothes; lies, shamelessly, carelessly, about his past, and allows his passivity and need to ingratiate to pull him into a dangerous game of duplicity and sin.

Willy-nilly, by chance, Richard finds himself joining a circle of classics majors, who worship at the shrine of their teacher and adviser, one Julian Morrow, a brilliant, if highly eccentric, professor, who is rumored to have been a friend of T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound. Julian regards his students as members of a select secret society, and his students reciprocate his attention with obsessive devotion. "His students -- if they were any mark of his tutelage -- were imposing enough," Ms. Tartt writes, "and different as they all were they shared a certain coolness, a cruel, mannered charm which was not modern in the least but had a strange cold breath of the ancient world; they were magnificent creatures, such eyes, such hands, such looks -- sic oculos, sic ille manus, sic ora fere bat."

Henry, the acknowledged leader of the group, is an amazingly wealthy and erudite autodidact, obsessed with obscure scholarship (he is translating "Paradise Lost" into Latin) and given to dark, judgmental moods; he is cold and manipulative, though capable of great charm. Francis, an equally wealthy young man, is high-strung, petulant and seductive toward men and women alike. The twins, Camilla and Charles, are beautiful, inscrutable and seemingly inseparable. And Bunny, poor doomed Bunny, is the group's oddball: a doltish, irritating fellow who's constantly borrowing money and imposing on others' good will. All five share two things: an overfondness for alcohol and a fatal tendency to take Julian's remarks as gospel.

One of Julian's favorite sayings is that "beauty is terror." He speaks of the pleasures of losing control and the foolishness of denying "the unseen world" of "emotion, darkness, barbarism." One night, Henry, Francis, Camilla and Charles decide to translate his theories into action: they decide to try to hold a Dionysian rite. The results are disturbingly concrete. Wolves start howling, a bull roars, the river runs white, the moon changes shape and Dionysus himself appears. Somehow, in the process, a man -- a chicken farmer, on whose property the students have trespassed -- is gorily murdered, his neck broken, his brains splattered on his face.

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The Secret History by Donna Tartt

Publication Date: April 13, 2004
Genres: Fiction , Psychological Suspense , Psychological Thriller , Suspense , Thriller
Paperback: 576 pages
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN-10: 1400031702
ISBN-13: 9781400031702
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A Close Reading of the Chilling Prologue of Donna Tartt’s The Secret History

"why, looking for new ferns.".

I have been re-reading Donna Tartt’s The Secret History every other year for almost two decades. I should say that I don’t make it a point to do this; it’s more that, somehow, I wind up with the book in my hands at regular intervals. And unfortunately (fortunately?) for me, if I pick the book up to read a page or two, or find a favorite line, I always feel compelled to read the whole thing again. Yes, it’s a sickness.

My re-reads usually happen in the winter, but I’ve noticed that I also gravitate to the novel during moments of personal anxiety and uncertainty. So you may not be surprised to hear that I’ve been reading it again recently. This time, I was struck anew by the book’s masterful prologue, which manages to beguile the reader, fire up the plot, and preview Tartt’s artistic concerns all at once. No small feat for the first page and a half of a debut novel.

The Secret History is so frequently referred to as a “why-done-it” (as opposed to a “who-done-it”) that I can’t identify the original source of the phrase (it was probably Tartt’s publicity team, all things considered). It’s easy to understand where this description comes from—after all, our narrator gives the game up right away. In the prologue, our narrator Richard sketches out what has become the defining moment of his life: when he and his friends kill someone named Bunny. Of course, on a first read, we don’t know who Bunny is, or why they’ve killed him. Which is exactly the point: it’s a ploy, a way to get a reader invested, telling them that you killed someone and that you’re going to explain yourself. Not bad, as a literary tool. But this is only what the prologue is doing in the broadest of terms. There’s much more to unpack here.

So let’s start at the beginning:

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. It was one of the biggest manhunts in Vermont history—state troopers, the FBI, even an army helicopter; the college closed, the dye factory in Hampden shut down, people coming in from New Hampshire, upstate New York, as far away as Boston.

The first sentence in the book could, in many ways, stand in for the whole thing. It neatly juxtaposes the beauty of the natural world (mountains, melting snow, a sense of spring) with matter-of-fact murder (that stark, clean “Bunny had been dead for several weeks”), and then hints at the real genius of the book: the moral ambiguity of all of the characters—or at least their essential resistance to anything other than their own elaborate, quasi-hypothetical, Greek tragedy-infused narrative of themselves. (Richard later remarks on this more explicitly: “I suppose we’d simply thought about it too much, talked of it too often, until the scheme ceased to be a thing of the imagination and took on a horrible life of its own . . . The idea of murdering Bunny was horrific, impossible; nonetheless we dwelt on it incessantly, convinced ourselves there was no alternative, devised plans which seemed slightly improbable and ridiculous but which actually worked quite well when put to the test.”) I mean, several weeks? They kill him; ten days later, the body is found; still it’s only weeks later, when they appreciate the magnitude of the response—an army helicopter!—that they come to “understand the gravity” of the situation. These are, after all, children playing at murder and myth, trying to touch the other side.

Right away, too, Tartt sets up the tone and storytelling style of the novel. The first sentence is formal, even a little stiff in its beauty—“the gravity of our situation”—while the second slides into this conspiratorial, storytelling mode of Richard as Everyman, even after so much time spent imitating his patrician friends. “He’d been dead for ten days before they found him, you know.” Both the lean in and the lowered voice are implied.

But then, as if feeling how close he’s getting to the story he both wants to tell and to avoid, Richard circles away, reeling back from the reader, filling the space between himself and Bunny’s death with state troopers and helicopters and a list of all the states around Vermont.

Oddly, the next two paragraphs begin with the same phrase: “It is difficult to believe.” Here’s the first, which kicks off a chilling paragraph about how they weren’t even trying to hide the body, and that there would have been no story “had it not been for the snow that fell that night” and muddled up the narrative of a hiking accident:

It is difficult to believe that Henry’s modest plan could have worked so well despite these unforeseen events.

And here’s the second:

It is difficult to believe that such an uproar took place over an act for which I was partially responsible, even more difficult to believe I could have walked through it—the cameras, the uniforms, the black crowds sprinkled over Mount Cataract like ants in a sugar bowl—without incurring a blink of suspicion.

This is interesting, the kind of repetition that an editor might try to get you to vary before your final draft. (Circumstantial evidence would suggest that Tartt is resistant to editors, which I would consider in her case to be another mark of her genius, but I cannot prove this.) The second paragraph also comes after a hard stop, a horizontal line indicating a break in the narrative, which feels unusual in a prologue, especially one this short, but this underscores the functionality of these two mirrored paragraphs, both beginnings of a kind. The first focuses on what happened, what they did; the second is about Richard being the one (or one of the ones) to do it. Again, this is a reflection of the themes of the book writ large: Richard is almost equally baffled by the fact that any of this happened at all and that he was included in it, when he was so different from these alluring, amoral rich kids, bound to them only by their mutual obsession with beauty.

I wonder whether there was ever a draft in which the second “It is difficult to believe” was the first sentence in the book. It feels like it could be, but it’s the more subtle of the two, the less fantastic. If so, the choice to demote it was a good one, structurally, but for me, it gets closer to reflecting the most intriguing thread of the novel: Richard’s self-knowledge, or lack thereof.

After these paragraphs, we have turned the page, and we quickly see that we are coming to the end of the prologue, which is fine, because now we’ve come to the real crux of it: next, Richard recounts the moment just before Bunny’s death. Here it is as it appears in the prologue:

What are you doing up here? said Bunny, surprised, when he found the four of us waiting for him.

Why, looking for new ferns, said Henry.

The actual murder is completely elided here, given no space at all: the next sentence and paragraph begins “And after we stood whispering in the underbrush. . . ” Richard simply moves on; after all he’s only trying to get you invested in his narrative. He’s not going to give you everything yet.

But here is the same moment as it appears 265 pages later, at the book’s midpoint:

“Tell me,” Bunny said, and I thought I detected for the first time a note of suspicion. “Just what the Sam Hill are you guys doing out here anyway?”

The woods were silent, not a sound.

Henry smiled. “Why, looking for new ferns,” he said, and took a step towards him.

This is followed by more blank space than anywhere else in the novel; it’s the end of Book I. In my copy that means a full six pages of space in which to imagine Bunny’s murder—the push, the fall—before Richard reappears at the beginning of chapter six to cringe and say “Just for the record, I do not consider myself an evil person (though how like a killer that makes me sound!).” And then he hems and haws and doesn’t really describe it at all. “I am sorry, as well, to present such a sketchy and disappointing exegesis of what is in fact the central part of my story,” he tells us, and goes on to justify himself by explaining how he’s just like all the other murderers who keep the details of their crimes close to the vest. He claims a sense of unreality, but it’s a deft move by Tartt: she manages to keep the suspense—about a murder we’ve known from the first page would happen, no less—alive by continuing to shroud it from us. How much different would this scene feel with even the slightest description of Henry pushing Bunny?

But back to the repeated moment just before the push, which I find particularly fascinating. The prologue version has no dialogue markers, a move which often gives an exchange a kind of inexactness—the sense is of summarization or general recounting as opposed to an exact reporting of who said what. This makes perfect sense; Tartt sets up the prologue to introduce Richard’s story as one being written years after the events of the book’s present action. So by the time Richard is writing the prologue, this exchange, the moment before the act he couldn’t come back from, has become a kind of personal legend. Of course the two recountings aren’t exactly the same. Except when it comes to Henry.

Maybe this is just because Henry’s line here is so ineffably incredible. I mean, it’s essentially Henry’s entire character in one sentence: erudite, false, menacing, but also somehow innocent (faux-innocent?), hopeful, secret-seeking, nature-seeking. It’s such a sweet and weird and terrifying thing to say before you murder someone. “Why, looking for new ferns.” That “why,” those ferns!

But it’s also because this is a novel about one person being fully transfixed by another, about Richard’s shame and pleasure at being led up to the edge of the cliff and off of it. If the moment just before Bunny’s death has become legend for Richard, Henry himself has become myth. In my reading, it’s Henry, not the murder of a friend, that Richard can’t quite shake.

The prologue ends like this:

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.

Of course, as we already know, he is barely capable of telling it. He circles and circles and tries not to look. Which, of course, makes us the rest of us look all the harder.

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critical book reviews

Donna Tartt
Aug 23, 2020

The Secret History - critical review: explored as a Greek Tragedy

Donna Tartt's 'The Secret History' follows a year of six classic student's lives at a New England College, starting the novel off with the declaration of a murder. When I read 'The Secret History' (1992) by Donna Tartt, what struck me most was its connection with the classical world. I wanted to explore this connection further, and so read Aristotle's 'Poetics' as well as Peter Burian's article 'Myth into muthos: the shaping of a tragic plot' to use as sources to judge the novel by, in terms of what classical tragedian conventions it used. Furthermore, I wanted to explore why Tartt connected her novel so much to that of a Greek Tragedy, and I read Francois Pauw's 'the classical intertext in Donna Tartt's The Secret History' to understand this further. Jean-Pierre Vernant's definition of tragedy: "the field of the problematical, the area where the familiar institutions are called into question and the moral vocabulary, no longer adequate, becomes ambiguous or self-contradictory" fits exactly into the novel and what it is portraying: it questions morality, youthful ignorance and hubris, the denial of modern reality and a dark side of intellectual endeavour. Moreover, the novel fits with the themes of a Greek Tragedy: the idea of conflict, sacrifice, retribution, knowledge, fate as well as the characteristics: hamartia, narration, language, unity. It also has a direct reference to a Greek tragedy since much of its plot is based on Euripides' Bacchae: which is centred, as is The Secret History, around the God Dionysus: The God of wine, disguise, and ritual madness. Therefore, not only does The Secret History's structure, plot and characters seem to resemble that of a Greek Tragedy, but through doing this, it encapsulates the characters' 'hamartia', or fatal flaw, which leads to their downfall.

Aristotle claimed that the moral and phycological framework of a Greek Tragedy is 'Hamartia', or fatal flaw of the character, which is what leads them to their downfall. In the first sentence of chapter one, Richard, our narrator, asks 'Does such a thing 'as the fatal flaw', that showy dark crack running down the middle of a life, exist outside literature?' and then answers '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.' This mention of the hamartia at the beginning of the novel shows its centrality to both the plot and morality of it, as the novel as a whole seems to be a portrayal of the significance of human flaws in individuals' fate. This idea that Richard's fatal flaw is the 'longing for the picturesque at all costs' echoes the hamartia of all six students: the desperation to see the world as it is not. This can be seen through their obsession with the classical world, shown through the constant comparisons or references to Greek figures, ideologies or literary, displaying that it becomes for them a form of how they want the world to be. The comparatives they make of modern reality to classical world references remain consistently present throughout the novel. For example, Julian's profile is described to compare with "an Etruscan in a bas-relief", Francis' country property is described as a "mock tholos" and the feeling of wet grass ignites images of Olympus or Valhalla for Richard. This constant use of metaphors and similes to describe people, objects and nature show their vision as thwarted with the classical world: as their reality is always influenced their aim to see their world as something else. This interest in the classical world connects with their denial of modern reality. This is seen literally through Henry's lack of knowledge of a man landing on the moon, but also symbolically through their classroom: the fact it is geographically and personally cut off from the rest of the students (Julian, their professor, "conducts the selection on a personal rather than academic basis") and described as "the Lyceum" and a "platonic microcosm of what he thought a classroom should be" shows this disconnection with the real world. Furthermore, the use of the Greek or Latin in their speech in public or in front of other students at university in order to be secretive could be interpreted as another portrayal of their attempt to cut themselves out of the modern world and live in one that they feel is superior. This consistent use of comparatives not only shows that it influences how they see the world, but it could be interpreted it explains how they act in the world: making it a flaw, instead of merely a characteristic. They justify themselves and their actions through their version of the world's morality, instead of the standards that everyone else lives by. When Henry dismissively mentions the idea of being arrested for the murder of Bunny, he claims "Frankly I do not see how well either the taxpayers' interest or my own would be served by my spending sixty or seventy years in Vermont Jail" and when referencing the murder of the farmer during their Dionysian experiment, he claims, "I mean, this man was not Voltaire we killed." Through referencing his and the taxpayers' "interests" as well as labelling the victim as "not Voltaire", we see this complete denial, or lack of awareness, of justice, which could be interpreted as being a result of their tainted vision of reality: in which their intellectual obsession with the classical world becomes how they see their reality and how they act within that.

The idea of the audience knowing the fate of the characters is central to Greek Tragedy and Epic: like that of the Iliad in which the readers know the end of the plotline, but the suspense is created in questioning how and why one gets there. This is echoed in 'The Secret History', as the victim and murderers of the case are given in the prologue in the novel, meaning the central question is not 'who done it?' but 'why?'. It has been interpreted that the novel in itself comments on divine fate and that all the characters provide a study for what happens when a person attempts to escape their fate. Contrastingly, it has been argued that the novel is a tale of characters as a victim of chance. This idea could be supported through the characters reasoning for being in the Greek Class: in which Richard chose it in order to sleep later on Monday's, Henry's interest resulted from a childhood car accident when he was confined to bed for a long period of time, and for Bunny it is an attempted solution of therapy for his dyslexia, and that the ending was, in fact, a "horrible string of coincidences.". However, I think it is more convincing to portray that all the characters acts and consequences are brought about by human agency, and instead, chance or fate has little to do with it, apart from it being sources for what the characters want to believe their situation can be explained by. This can be seen through Henry's planning of Bunny's murder, in which he is "allowing Bunny to choose the circumstances of his own death", compares the plan to a "chess game" and when Bunny walks past them waiting for him, Henry exclaims to him that "it's very lucky" that he walked past them. This is what Henry wants to believe, that both Bunny himself and luck were equal partners of causality in his death. This is contrasted by the description of the murder, in which it is portrayed that the woods were "deathly still" and "silent", and that "there was no wind; not a bird sang, not a leaf stirred." This is contrasted by the description of Henry who "took a step towards him [Bunny]." The absence of the involvement of nature: as it was "silent, not a sound" and motionless: "still" "no wind" "not [..] stirred", juxtaposed with the active verbs of Henry stepping, along with the passivity of Bunny as Henry steps "towards him", could be interpreted as confirming this idea that there was nothing but the human agency that brought them to this result: no luck, chance, or the natural world intervening. Therefore, through looking at the language of the narrative of the death compared to Henry's dismissive planning of it, it further echoes their denial of reality. The fact the readers know the fate of the victim, similarly to Greek Tragedies, means the suspense is built up through understanding the phycology of these characters in order to explain what led them to this action.

The novel's structural similarities such as the units of time, place and action and unity between 'episodes' further create the novel to directly echo that of a Greek tragedy. In 'Poetics', Aristotle portrays that tragedies are not histories which show all the happenings of a single person or event, but instead, they are the narrative of a part of it, therefore the poet "should be concerned with a unified action, whole and complete, possessing a beginning, middle parts and an end". He interestingly uses the example of The Iliad and The Odyssey, in which they are both narratives of "one part" of something much bigger: for the Iliad: the Trojan War, and for the Odyssey: the life of Odysseus. This structural technique is adopted in The Secret History, in which the novel is based around one academic year at the college, and within that has a beginning, middle parts and end surrounding the unified action of the murder of Bunny. Furthermore, Aristotle advocates the importance of the events in tragedies as needing to be necessarily what would happen theoretically: it should be "the kind of thing that would happen, i.e. what is possible in accordance with probability" meaning there is a connection between events. Tartt achieves this, in the way that the events that occur are probable due to the character's fatal flaw of excessive elitism leading to their dismissal of the modern world, which in turn leads to their actions.

Another aspect that Tartt shares with Greek tragedies is the emphasis on both knowledge and language. Aristotle in 'Poetics' displays that tragedy can involve moments of recognition, in which characters change from ignorance to knowledge. This idea surrounds the plot of the novel, in which the threat of the 'recognition' of society drives their action of murder, and haunts them afterwards. Furthermore, the reader itself is a vehicle for recognition, in which they are moved from ignorance to knowledge on the answer to why they committed the crime as the novel progresses. Through this recognition comes the importance of language and words. The importance of language is consistent in Greek tragedies, not only due to the necessary constraints of a stage, meaning the action is often not shown but often told to the audience through verbal interaction, but the issues of tragedy on moral, political, philosophical and theological issues are all created through verbal interactions and exclaims of characters, meaning knowledge is directly connected to language. This is used in The Secret History, in which the ignorance of society to the student's crime is dependent on Bunny's verbal act of merely telling someone about what they did. Furthermore, the idea of the readers experiencing the action of the plot through verbal interaction is used in the novel, in which the Dionysian experiment is narrated not directly to the reader, but through Richard's conversation with Camilla and Henry in which they narrate it, and the murder of Bunny is told retrospectively through Richard. This creates this emphasis on language as the accuracy of the situation is dependent on the honesty of the narrators. Therefore, this emphasis on knowledge is shown through that the importance of language: as that is the source for displaying or hiding knowledge. Since humans are the source of both knowledge and language, it could be suggested that this emphasis on them further displays the fact that it was human autonomy, and with that their fatal flaw, that is the complete cause of their downfall.

With this idea comes the narrative style of the novel, which also is linked to that of a tragedy. A tragedy lacks a single authoritative and moral voice, meaning that they are filled with 'multiple voices' which exclaim their own ideologies and justifications to matters such as morality, politics and theology. In the same way, The Secret History lacks an authoritative omniscient narrator, as, through the first-person narration, the accuracy of the narration is necessarily undermined: and the readers lack a just and moral framework to judge the other characters by. However, since Richard is 'the outsider' of the group, it has been interpreted that his first-person narration echoes the Greek chorus, a neutral source of narrative for the audience: as he is a witness of the events, not truly involved in the action. However, it may be more convincing to argue that instead, his narrative voice creates this further idea of unreliability to the narration. We know, from the beginning of the novel, that his flaw is his "morbid longing for the picturesque at all costs" and he acknowledges himself that he has an "inability to see anyone, or anything, in its true light." Therefore, not only is the plot a chain of causality that started with the character's hamartia, but the narrative itself is too. Richard's inability to see anything in its "true light" echoes the seemingly collective hamartia of the group: the inability to see the world in it's "true light" but instead through their own thwarted classical lens. Therefore, as readers, this lack of an authoritative voice is prevalent and significant, as Richard is merely another 'point of view' in terms of the views of morality and justice in the novel, and the way the story is told becomes part of the plot itself: being a result of, what could be interpreted, the center of the novel: the fatal flaw.

Moreover, this idea of undermining characters goes against one of Aristotle's characteristics of a tragedy that he portrays in his 'Poetics', as he claims that it is "an imitation of people better than we are." This statement, at first glance, does not fit with the characters of The Secret History. However, from their constant comparatives to the classics, to their often reference to fiction itself, it could be suggested that the characters almost want their story to be a version of a Greek Tragedy, and for them, in this, they represent the 'better' people compared to the contemporary audience. This idea could be supported by the quotation "monstrous as it was, the corpse itself seemed little more than a prop, something brought out in the dark by stagehands and laid at Henry's feet, to be discovered when the lights came up", along with the description of Bunny as "an old familiar jokester cast […] in the tragic role" and that Henry, when referencing his interaction with the FBI, "had waited in the wings a long while" so "he could step onto the stage and assume the role he'd written for himself." This theatrical lexis: "prop", "stagehands", "tragic role", "wings" further creates this idea of the character's refusing to see the world as it is: and in their idealized 'Greek Tragedy' version of reality, they believe they dominate 'better people' than their contemporaries. However, through looking at another of Aristotle's statements, the audience can understand the true nature of who envelopes the identity of the 'tragic hero' in the novel. Aristotle claims that the identity of the character who has the tragic fall cannot be "decent men" as this "does not evoke fear or pity, but disgust", neither can it be the "wicked person" as this is "agreeable." He concludes, therefore, that they must be "the person intermediate between this" who is "not outstanding in moral excellence or justice" and his tragic downfall is "not due to any moral defect or depravity but to an error of some kind." If we judge the characters of The Secret History through this definition, then we are left with Richard as the 'tragic hero' of the novel, as the other characters are mostly unamiable. Richard himself defines himself as fitting this categorization, as he claims that "I do not consider myself an evil person […] while I have never considered myself a very good person, neither can I bring myself to believe that I am a spectacularly bad one." Furthermore, his downfall remains consistent with Aristotle's definition, as it is due to an "error of some kind" instead of "moral depravity". Unlike the other characters, Richard's involvement in Bunny's murder is mainly passive, as his membership of the Greek class, knowledge of the happenings and location of being where Bunny's death occurs is by accident. Therefore, it could be argued that the character's desire to distort reality is further shown by the use of theatrical comparatives, emphasizing that they would aim for their story to be a Greek Tragedy: this would be an achievement for them, and by which they feel would encompass the "better people". However, for the reader's version of the tragedy, the characters are neither justified or "better" than contemporary society in the moral sense, but instead completely delusional to it. In the novel, therefore, the 'tragic hero', can be defined as our narrator, Richard, who we can feel both pity and fear for, as his "morbid longing for the picturesque" is the "error" that leads to his suffering.

To conclude, the novels consistent references to the classic world is a necessary part of the centrality of the novel: the student's ignorance at real reality, despite their intellectual talent, and with that, their determination to see the world as it is not, which can be labelled as the characters' 'fatal flaw', and reason for their ultimate downfall. The hostility of the characters vision of the world is shown at the beginning of the novel, prior to the prologue, in which a quote of Nietzsche is used, in which he asserts that '1. A young man cannot possibly know what Greeks and Romans are' and '2. He does not know whether he is suited for finding out about them.' Reading the novel through this quote, their flaw is not only fatal as it leads to malice actions which they feel are justified, but it is fatal because it is necessarily unachievable: they cannot fully understand the classical world and live through this vision and its standards as members of the modern world. The characters dismiss this idea and are determined to see the world through an alternate lens. This necessarily creates issues on illusions: their desire to be in the presence of the God Dionysus: "the master of Illusions" and consistently live in a world they are not, and knowledge: the danger of it is what leads them to feel justified in their actions. Therefore, this inability to achieve an alternate reality, simultaneously with the inability to address, live in and live through the standards of the modern world leaves them to be unable to live through any perspective at all.

Book Review: The Secret History by Donna Tartt

The dark academia aesthetic took social media by storm in the 2020s. Defined by Tayla Glowacz as “the romanticization of learning,” the genre conjures up images of tweed suits, gothic architecture, leather-bound books, and the occasional murder. In short, dark academia is about valorizing the elite few privileged enough to dedicate their lives to the pursuit of higher knowledge, where humanities and the arts reign supreme. It’s also a popular literary sub-genre, populated by characters who study in old institutions and come from even older money, whose obsessive and eccentric tendencies often leave them entangled in sinister plots involving drugs or murder or both.

One of the most revered texts within the dark academia subculture is Donna Tartt’s modern classic, The Secret History. Donna Tartt’s sophomore novel is to dark academia what Superman is to superheroes: the originator of the genre, which would later come to influence similar works. Written in 1992, The Secret History follows protagonist and narrator Richard Papen as he falls in love with a group of eccentric but self-obsessed and dangerous Classics Majors. As an inverted murder mystery, the novel skips the “whodunnit” and instead creates tension by taking the readers through the build-up to the crime and its inevitable fallout.

The Plot: Classics And Classism

Richard Papen slogged through a dull working-class childhood in California. When he earns a scholarship to Hampton College, an elite private university in Vermont, he gets a chance to abandon his background and make something more of his life. After enrolling in a highly selective Classics class, he encounters five eccentric students: the charming romantic Francis Abernathy, stoic Camilla Macaulay, Camilla’s hot-headed twin brother Charles, and their de-facto leader, the mysterious linguistics genius Henry Winter. There’s also Edmund “Bunny” Corcoran, a spoiled jokester who — as the prologue reveals — eventually becomes a victim of murder.

It becomes apparent that the entire group is far removed from reality. They have isolated themselves from most of society to dedicate their lives to the study of Ancient Greece and its practices. Most of them have become so self-important that they care little for the consequences of their actions on others. As the group’s choices become more and more atrocious, the book tests the limit of their detachment, trying to see how far they can go before the horror of their actions catches up to them.

Richard Papen: Elegantly Unreliable

Enthralled by their world of obscene wealth and limitless intellect, the once-modest Richard immediately becomes desperate to become part of their in-group. His obsession leads him to romanticize, excuse, and later on participate in the group’s atrocities, including their murder of Bunny.

Dark academia’s obsession with beauty lends to its language — works in the genre strive to blur the lines between prose and poetry. And perhaps Richard’s narration is responsible for this trend. Richard’s voice is complex, poetic, and beautifully structured, so much so that it drives home one of the main themes of the book: that beauty can make evil appear acceptable.

My Thoughts About The Book

As well-crafted as its plot and prose are, The Secret History is not for everyone. The problem with the book is that it cannot seem to decide whether it is critical or aspirational. Though the plot seems to want to condemn its characters and their elitism, the elegant prose used to describe their lifestyles seems deliberately constructed to beget desire or envy. As readers, we’re supposed to question our sympathy for the classics group, but we only developed that sympathy because could not see them outside of Richard’s rose-colored glasses.

However, if you’re looking for a psychological thriller with an exciting plot, The Secret History is a great read. Though the prose can be heavy at times, its world is so richly written that it ultimately sucks readers in. And since the book runs for 500 pages, readers have a long time to get lost in it.

Though it’s likely that Donna Tartt never intended to create a subgenre, The Secret History had such a strong grip on readers that many authors became compelled to reproduce its themes, plotlines, and atmosphere. Readers interested in the genre can look into titles like If We Were Villains , Ninth House, and Ace of Spades.

If you’re interested in dark academia’s strong prose and macabre plotlines, but want to explore works outside the genre, you can consider Madeline Miller’s Circe , which is a book that puts a fresh spin on the Odyssey’s famous witch. Our review of the novel goes more in-depth about its plot, themes, and quality.

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The latest book reviews and book news, the secret history: book review.

The secret History by Donna Tartt

Not many novel can make Ancient Greek interesting but The Secret History by Donna Tartt does just that. A novel about a group of college students that kill one of their group members because of a dark secret. Keep reading to find out whether this book should be your next read!

The Secret History Summary

Richard Papen has enrolled at the elite Hampden College in Vermont. He will be studying Ancient Greek but he is unable to enroll into the Classics class because the professor, Julian Morrow, handpicks the students. With the help of his new friends, fraternal twins Charles and Camilla Macaulay; Francis Abernathy, Henry Winter, and Edmund “Bunny” Corcoran, Richard finally gets to join the exclusive club.

As Richard spends time with his new rich friends, he learns the dynamic of the group and their dark secret . Henrey is the leader and they all hag out at his secluded country home and Bunny seems to the one that doesn’t get along well with the group.

As Richard spends time with the group, he learns that not everything is as well as it seems. Everyone seems to have their own secrets and not everyone gets along. And beneath the surface, the group performsancient rituals that are taboo.

Some of the dark secrets come to life and make their way across the school and get the police involved. As time passes, Richard learns that this group is chaotic and that they have many dark secrets that turns the lives of everyone in the group upside down.

Donna Tartt is one of the authors I have come to appreciate a lot. Her writing is detailed and sometimes a little too much. However, the character descriptions are brilliant and feel very alive. You might like or dislike some of her characters because of Tartt’s details and making their flaws potent.

The Secret History is a big novel that can feel a bit too much at times with its themes and debauchery. But the plot twists and the crazy plot make it a fun read unlike anything else.

Tartt is not for everyone but this is one of her best works and worth checking out if you haven’t read anything from her before. She writes about one novel per decade but it feels like the end product is worth it. Her meticulous writing style is unique and leads to a wondrous tale!

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I started this, but I hope to get back to it soon!

Its a long book so I don’t blame you but it is worth finishing for sure!

Definitely! I could already tell!! thank you!

There are so many mistakes in your review, you should be ashamed.

Hey. Is the murder a spoiler of the story? I haven’t read the book. I haven’t read enough fiction books. But this sounds interesting.

No it’s the first sentence of the novel I believe lol. It’s the whole plot of the novel. And yea, it’s a great read

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There’s an error. The house they hang out in in the country belongs to Francis. And Henry is more or less the apparent leader of the group, because they always did what he said to do. But it’s stated here like an official thing.

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Book Review: The Secret History

Donna Tartt and her debut novel The Secret History is one that will stick with me for quite a long time. The Secret History follows insecure Richard Papen, a somewhat timid boy from Plano California. Richard, desperate to leave Plano and his unattentive parents, decides to go to college at Hampden, a school in Vermont, specializing in Humanities. Of course, when Richard arrives, he completely falls in love with Hampden and its very "Dead Poets Society" vibe to the school. Previously wanting to be in the medical field, but soon after developing a distaste for the field, Richard promptly decides to turn to studying the classics. We discover Julian, the only teacher of Greek in the college, who only takes five students a year in his class. Somehow, Richard makes it into this selective course, becoming the sixth member. We as readers are introduced to the slightly odd and quirky members of the Greek class, and come along with Richard as he slowly develops a friendship with each of them. However, Richard deduces that something is off about his new friends, and with this, dark secrets are unraveled, and we watch as each of the classmates descend into madness. The Secret History touches upon the study of human morality, and the concept that terrible things hold a kind of beauty to them. I really enjoyed reading this novel and being forced to face psychological dilemmas. What is good? What is evil? What makes someone good or evil? The Secret History really led me around by the nose, and I enjoyed the twists and turns I experienced because of this novel. There were many influential quotes in this story and the writing was beautiful. Even though the novel might have a darker mood, I couldn't help but be enraptured by every word Tartt set out for me. Overall, if you enjoy a "dark academia" style of book, and is willing to read this novel with an open mindset, The Secret History is definitely for you.

Reviewer Grade: 11

Literature & Fiction
Genre Fiction
Coming of Age

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The Secret History: A Read with Jenna Pick

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A READ WITH JENNA BOOK CLUB PICK INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER A contemporary literary classic and "an accomplished psychological thriller... absolutely chilling" ( Village Voice ), from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Goldfinch.

Under the influence of a charismatic classics professor, a group of clever, eccentric misfits at a New England college discover a way of thought and life a world away from their banal contemporaries. But their search for the transcendent leads them down a dangerous path, beyond human constructs of morality.

“A remarkably powerful novel [and] a ferociously well-paced entertainment.... Forceful, cerebral, and impeccably controlled.”— The New York Times

Listening Length 22 hours and 3 minutes
Author Donna Tartt
Narrator Donna Tartt
Audible release date July 11, 2023
Language English
Publisher Random House Audio
ASIN B0C6FJPXNN
Version Unabridged
Program Type Audiobook
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Listening Length	22 hours and 3 minutes
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Audible.com Release Date	July 11, 2023
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Program Type	Audiobook
Version	Unabridged
Language	English
ASIN	B0C6FJPXNN
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5 star 4 star 3 star 2 star 1 star 3 star 51% 28% 14% 4% 3% 14%
5 star 4 star 3 star 2 star 1 star 2 star 51% 28% 14% 4% 3% 4%
5 star 4 star 3 star 2 star 1 star 1 star 51% 28% 14% 4% 3% 3%

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Customers find the visual design immaculate and masterful at creating mood and setting. They also find the plot interesting, truthful, and strange. Readers describe the writing style as admirable, sometimes funny, and great fun. However, some find the pacing very slowly and plodding. Opinions are mixed on the atmosphere, characterization, and content. Some find the novel heartbreaking, wonderful, and satisfying, while others say it's unpleasant to read about.

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Customers find the book impressively written, intense, and wonderful. They also say it's a quick read and great for a first novel.

"...A fascinating read , I only read one other Donna Tartt book The Goldfinch but I liked this one a lot better." Read more

"...Overall, a very good read ! Still can't get over the ending! Was not expecting that. Going to add this to my faves list.☆ 4 stars" Read more

"...This book is worth reading even if you have no one to read it with you, but if at all feasible, have a friend read it as well...." Read more

"...And then there are passes of just well-written prose ...." Read more

Customers find the plot interesting, truthful, and dark. They also say the ending is a surprise. Readers also mention that the book keeps tension going throughout the long book. They appreciate the rich, clearly drawn scenes and mood and setting.

"I love the writing in this. It was a fascinating bildungsroman , made me think about my own college experience though it wasn't as crazy as this one...." Read more

"...She keeps tension going throughout the long book , although at times, I felt it dragging...." Read more

"...More to the point, the storyline loses some of its tightness at the college's winter break and more often toward the end of the novel, as Tartt..." Read more

"...describe the consequences upon the group, but it is a hypnotic and addictive story . Depressing, rather, but a glorious trip. I highly recommend it." Read more

Customers find the writing style admirable, witty, and filled with immediacy. They also say the scenes flow together perfectly, and the author has a great voice that sucks them in. Customers also mention that the book is not overly detailed and has an abundance of irony.

"...the atmosphere of the college and town perfectly as it was quite descriptive . The characters are well-developed...." Read more

"...; Donna Tartt, not incidentally, is possessed of a wonderful turn of phrase , which is at once precise, seemingly effortless, and (thankfully) never..." Read more

" Well written ." Read more

"...regarding the novel is its tendency to ramble, to spend precious time illustrating minute details of the characters’ personalities, surroundings,..." Read more

Customers find the visual design of the book immaculate, dreamy, thoughtful, and intellectual. They also say the book is accurately painted and deftly drawn. Readers also mention that the book creates a world that's tangible and unique.

"...which is at once precise, seemingly effortless, and (thankfully) never ostentatious ...." Read more

"...But to me, Tartt creates a world that’s tangible , where every description explains things so poignantly that you often feel you couldn’t have worded..." Read more

"...This book is deep and thoughtful and complex...." Read more

"...Nabokov, whose prose, some of which includes poetry, is deeper, more artistic , suggestive, sonorous." Read more

Customers are mixed about the characterization. Some mention the characters are well developed and thought out, while others say they're less developed than they seem and feel more like pencil sketches.

"...The characters themselves are incredibly interesting , and even more so as there is so much mystery surrounding their enigmatic behavior...." Read more

"...At the same time, the characters are distinct . They react differently to situations, and their actions follow what we know of them...." Read more

"...The characters weren't the most likeable but I really enjoyed reading them...." Read more

"... Harriet was a likable character ; you won’t find a likable character in THE GOLDFINCH or THE SECRET HISTORY, unless you count the furniture maker in..." Read more

Customers are mixed about the content. Some find the book interesting commentary on the lack of constraint in a small island, with a touch of cultured sophistication. They also appreciate the complex themes and ancient Greek references. However, others say the book frustrates the reader at every turn with unnecessary meandering description of irrelevant things. They feel the author is too passive and aloof.

"...They were self absorbed , arrogant , intelligent but very naive at the same time...." Read more

"...story was really good, but overly detailed in some places and really vague in others ...." Read more

"...a perfect choice for my book club because there are so many topics for possible conversation ...." Read more

"...But I can say that if you’re looking for an intellectual , modern classic, a haunting psychological thriller, a mix between Lord of the Flies, The..." Read more

Customers are mixed about the atmosphere. Some find the novel heartbreaking, wonderful, and strange. They also say it's a flawed story well told, and a portrait of college life infinitely satisfying. However, others say the plot is hard to believe, unpleasant to read about, and self-serving. They describe the characters as deftly drawn, but the subject matter leaves a sour taste in their mouth.

"...if you’re looking for an intellectual, modern classic, a haunting psychological thriller , a mix between Lord of the Flies, The Perks of Being a..." Read more

"...leftovers is unnecessary to the plot, hard to believe, and unpleasant to read about ...." Read more

"...Quite simply, I liked the book immensely. It's beautiful and sad and moving and sometimes even a little funny...." Read more

"...for me, crucially, was the characters, and their self-serving, melodramatic , frankly unbelievable actions which drive the plot...." Read more

Customers find the pacing of the book to be slow and dragging at parts. They also say the book completely stalls in the middle and is never fully fleshed out in real time.

"...keeps tension going throughout the long book, although at times, I felt it dragging ...." Read more

"...But wow. What a masterpiece. It takes awhile to get into and can be a tough piece at times but the final twist took me for both an expected and..." Read more

"...and the weather outside, the writing was clear, fluid, and kept a steady pace ...." Read more

"...And great language. I really wanted to like this story. But it is really slow moving . Perhaps I’m shallow, but this book was frustratingly ponderous...." Read more

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Book Review: The Secret History
Book Review: The Secret History by Donna Tartt
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Book Review: The Secret History by Donna Tartt
The Secret History: Book Review
Book Review: The Secret History

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The Secret History" by Donna Tartt
The Secret History by Donna Tartt
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The Secret History by Donna Tartt
Donna Tartt. Under the influence of their charismatic classics professor, a group of clever, eccentric misfits at an elite New England college discover a way of thinking and living that is a world away from the humdrum existence of their contemporaries. But when they go beyond the boundaries of normal morality they slip gradually from obsession ...
THE SECRET HISTORY
The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and cinema-derived rhetoric up the ante continuously, and stunningly. One of the most impressive excursions into the supernatural in many a year. 10. Pub Date: March 6, 2000. ISBN: -375-70376-4.
The Secret History: A murder mystery that thrills 30 years on
The revelations led the LA Review of Books to question whether The Secret History is, in fact, "an incredibly elaborate and sophisticated burn book". Getty Images Tartt has also said that 'Books ...
An Honest Review of "The Secret History" by Donna Tartt
I finished my first book of 2024! Woohoo! I had high hopes going into The Secret History, Donna Tartt's first published novel. It's recently made its rounds as a suggestion on BookTok and ...
Review: The Secret History
Review: The Secret History. More than twenty years after its release, Donna Tartt's The Secret History continues to bewitch readers with the tale of a group of decadent Classics students at an elite Vermont college in the 1980s - and for good reason. The novel's first scene is that of a group of friends, including nineteen-year-old ...
Book Review: The Secret History by Donna Tartt
The coming of age tale has long held an important and cherished place in American literature, and the college novel has taken this genre to complex heights in the past several decades. Donna Tartt's The Secret History is arguably one of the best examples in recent memory, as it examines both the seductive and alienating aspects of the modern ...
Donna Tartt's The Secret History at 30
By Nick Burns. "Genuine beauty is always alarming": such is the conviction of the Greek professor in Donna Tartt's The Secret History, which was published 30 years ago this month. Hardly alarming, though, was the arrival of Tartt's debut. The book was subject to a bidding war in 1991 and much anticipated before its release.
REVIEW: The Secret History
6. Ok, so I realise that this book has been reviewed and praised many times over, but I just had to jump on the bandwagon and write about it too; since I read this book just a few months ago, I've regarded it as one of my new favourites. The story is about an elitist group of college students who, through the encouragement of their eccentric ...
Donna Tartt's "The Secret History" as Revenge Fantasy
Brooke Clark situates Donna Tartt's first novel, "The Secret History," in the long, august history of burn books. Is Donna Tartt's first novel, The Secret History, actually an incredibly ...
The Secret History turns 30: the enduring cult appeal of Donna Tartt's
The fact that The Secret History has never reached the screen hasn't dimmed the novel's appeal: the story of the various Hollywood attempts to take on Tartt's novel is a saga of starry names ...
Review: The Secret History
The Secret History has all the ingredients of a modern day classic - an elegant plot, intimately composed characters and a baroque undertone that is consistent and sinister. This psychological thriller truly deserves its place among the greats in the BBC's Big Read and it's easy to see why many cite it as one of their all time favourite ...
Books of The Times; Students Indulging In Course of Destruction
The Secret History By Donna Tartt 524 pages. Alfred A. Knopf. $23. ... The Book Review Podcast: Each week, top authors and critics talk about the latest news in the literary world. Listen here.
The Secret History: Tartt, Donna: 9781400031702: Amazon.com: Books
Donna Tartt is an American author who has achieved critical and public acclaim for her novels, which have been published in forty languages. Her first novel, The Secret History, was published in 1992. In 2003 she received the WH Smith Literary Award for her novel, The Little Friend, which was also nominated for the Orange Prize for Fiction.
The Secret History by Donna Tartt
by Donna Tartt. Publication Date: April 13, 2004. Genres: Fiction, Psychological Suspense, Psychological Thriller, Suspense, Thriller. Paperback: 576 pages. Publisher: Vintage. ISBN-10: 1400031702. ISBN-13: 9781400031702. A site dedicated to book lovers providing a forum to discover and share commentary about the books and authors they enjoy.
A Close Reading of the Chilling Prologue of Donna Tartt's The Secret
The first sentence in the book could, in many ways, stand in for the whole thing. It neatly juxtaposes the beauty of the natural world (mountains, melting snow, a sense of spring) with matter-of-fact murder (that stark, clean "Bunny had been dead for several weeks"), and then hints at the real genius of the book: the moral ambiguity of all of the characters—or at least their essential ...
Amazon.com: Customer reviews: The Secret History
To some degree, that's really the whole plot of The Secret History, which spends about half of its length building up to that murder, and the rest of the book watching as the aftermath unfolds. There are some other key events here and there, but the major one takes place off-stage entirely and the other effectively serves as the book's climax.
The Secret History
The Secret History is the first novel by the American author Donna Tartt, published by Alfred A. Knopf in September 1992. Set in New England, the campus novel tells the story of a closely knit group of six classics students at Hampden College, a small, elite liberal arts college located in Vermont based upon Bennington College, where Tartt was a student between 1982 and 1986.
The Secret History
Donna Tartt. Aug 23, 2020. The Secret History - critical review: explored as a Greek Tragedy. Donna Tartt's 'The Secret History' follows a year of six classic student's lives at a New England College, starting the novel off with the declaration of a murder. When I read 'The Secret History' (1992) by Donna Tartt, what struck me most was its ...
Book Review: The Secret History by Donna Tartt
And since the book runs for 500 pages, readers have a long time to get lost in it. Conclusion. Though it's likely that Donna Tartt never intended to create a subgenre, The Secret History had such a strong grip on readers that many authors became compelled to reproduce its themes, plotlines, and atmosphere.
The Secret History: Book Review
The Secret History: Book Review. Not many novel can make Ancient Greek interesting but The Secret History by Donna Tartt does just that. A novel about a group of college students that kill one of their group members because of a dark secret. Keep reading to find out whether this book should be your next read!
The Secret History by Donna Tartt, Paperback
The Secret History combines a bit of both—the unmistakable whiff of evil from William Golding's classic and the mad recklessness of priviledged youth from Bret Easton Ellis's novel of the '80s. . . . As stony and chilling as any Greek tragedian ever plumbed." —New York Newsday.
Book Review: The Secret History
Donna Tartt and her debut novel The Secret History is one that will stick with me for quite a long time. The Secret History follows insecure Richard Papen, a somewhat timid boy from Plano California. Richard, desperate to leave Plano and his unattentive parents, decides to go to college at Hampden, a school in Vermont, specializing in Humanities.
The Secret History: A Read with Jenna Pick
The Secret History was a perfect choice for my book club because there are so many topics for possible conversation. They can range from the praise and criticism that I just gave to speculation over the assignment of blame for the crimes committed by the protagonists to suggesting different directions the story could have taken at the end.

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