The Secret History: A murder mystery that thrills 30 years on
bbc.com
bbc.com
I'm a bit disappointed that the article didn't talk about the Dark Academia aesthetic/subculture more. It's been floating around the internet well before TikTok (I remember seeing it back on Tumblr a decade ago, and I was actually first introduced to the book through a piece of fan fiction) and, like cottagecore, I suspect has far more influence on pop culture then people are aware of
> Does such a thing as “the fatal flaw,” that showy dark crack running down the middle of a life, exist outside literature? I used to think it didn’t. Now I think it does. And I think that mine is this: a morbid longing for the picturesque at all costs.
> A moi. L’histoire d’une de mes folies.
> My name is Richard Papen. I am twenty-eight years old and I had never seen New England or Hampden College until I was nineteen. I am a Californian by birth and also, I have recently discovered, by nature. The last is something I admit only now, after the fact. Not that it matters.
> I grew up in Plano, a small silicon village in the north. No sisters, no brothers. My father ran a gas station and my mother stayed at home until I got older and times got tighter and she went to work, answering phones in the office of one of the big chip factories outside San Jose.
> Plano. The word conjures up drive-ins, tract homes, waves of heat rising from the blacktop. My years there created for me an expendable past, disposable as a plastic cup. Which I suppose was a very great gift, in a way. On leaving home I was able to fabricate a new and far more satisfying history, full of striking, simplistic environmental influences; a colorful past, easily accessible to strangers.
> The dazzle of this fictive childhood—full of swimming pools and orange groves and dissolute, charming show-biz parents—has all but eclipsed the drab original. In fact, when I think about my real childhood I am unable to recall much about it at all except a sad jumble of objects: the sneakers I wore year-round; coloring books and comics from the supermarket and the squashed old football I contributed to neighborhood games; little of interest, less of beauty. I was quiet, tall for my age, prone to freckles. I didn’t have many friends but whether this was due to choice or circumstance I do not now know. I did well in school, it seems, but not exceptionally well; I liked to read—Tom Swift, the Tolkien books—but also to watch television, which I did plenty of, lying on the carpet of our empty living room in the long dull afternoons after school.
Profoundly evocative prose. I really love this book.
There's a podcast named Once Upon a Time at Bennington College that I hesitate to recommend because it has a sort of tabloid, gossipy vibe to it, but it's about Bennington College in the 80's, where Tartt, Jonathan Lethem, and Bret Easton Ellis were contemporaries. I skipped through it, but I found it interesting the extent to which the backdrop of The Secret History came from Bennington.
https://cadence13.com/once-upon-a-time-at-bennington-college...
I'd also recommend the Tartt-narrated version of the audiobook. (I believe there's another version narrated by Robert Sean Leonard.)
If anyone else can recommend something like it please let me know.
It has the same basic concept of wealthy, pretentious young adults making bad choices, but it's set in NYC and Las Vegas instead of a rural liberal arts college. It's written 20 years after TSH and it's quite a bit more polished, for better or worse.
This (the original, not the Vegas-and-NYC thing) complete with the liberal arts college (or New England prep school) setting, is practically a little sub-genre all its own. Some kind of consequence of a high percentage of people who go on to write novels going through the prep-school-to-liberal-arts-college path (as Graeber notes in Bullshit Jobs, it's a whole lot easier to succeed in most sorts of literary careers when you can afford to go years on end with little or no pay, early in adulthood) plus write-what-you-know. There are tons and tons of books like that, some of them famous and others not.
* The Little Friend, in 2002, which is set in her native Mississippi; and
* The Goldfinch, in 2013, which won big prizes (including a Pulitzer), but is to my tastes inferior to the other two.
Her once-a-decade pattern suggests another book should be coming along any year now, but who can tell?
I mentioned uptopic that mystery writer Tana French included an homage to The Secret History in the second book of her "Dublin Murder Squad" series. It's worth reading, but I'm not sure how "like" Tartt it really is.
What makes French's series interesting is the shifting points of view within the same (fictional) Dublin bureau -- the first book is from the POV of a given character, and then the second shifts to someone who was a supporting character in the first book, and so forth.
Also, it actually is a murder mystery, which TSH arguably isn't.
It is so strange to me that I, a voracious reader in my 50s, have never heard of this book.
I read it new, but I was in an English department at the time.
(Like a lot of technical-career people my age (52), I have a liberal arts degree.)
By the second time I had researched Tartt's life (as the article says...she's almost Pynchon-esque in that she doesn't reveal much in public) and knew that it was based on actual people she had known in college (with Tartt herself as the gender-swapped protagonist).
By the third time I didn't care anymore and just read it because it's such a unique experience. As someone else said upstream it's not a murder mystery...it's a character study that happens to have murders.
The absolute best time to read this would be around 16-24 or so...but it would be interesting to hear the perspective of a first time reader at your age.
Like a lot of things I enjoyed at that age, I've been hesitant to revisit it because I'm afraid it's actually a pretentious and self-absorbed product of its time, not unlike those theatre students. I have no idea what it would be like to experience a book like that as an actual adult.
This is closer to where I landed, FWIW.
I read John Irving in those critical early 20's years, when elite cold-weather academic settings and the quirky complicated people that inhabit them was my vida loca. I enjoyed his books.
I read The Secret History a decade later, and it felt like a very well-written soap opera.
She wrote the book while she was in college, so it would be unkind to judge harshly! But it was neither interesting enough (OMG these people again?), nor entertaining enough (she takes her story pretty seriously), to leave a lasting impression on me.
John Irving left me with an indelible memory of a stuffed armadillo. And a lesson of what not to do while sitting in a car parked in a driveway.
...
Related recommendations ...
If you enjoy well-written coming-of-age stories set in elite cold-weather academia, I think Susan Choi's My Education stands up to reading in actual adulthood.
If you like John Irving but have no special affinity for the ECWA milieu, Tom Robbins is great fun.
The unflinching and unreliable insight into shared delusion and how being caught up in an imagined Greek tale distorts reality and perception of humanity.
It truly is a tragedy.
Compare it to the contemporaries it has spawned/influenced - all trite genre lit evoking those dire theatre kids from college (losers, not pretentious in my experience).
Cool.
Fun fact: excellent mystery author Tana French is also a fan, to the point that her novel The Likeness includes an extended and overt homage to Tartt's book.
Made me wish I'd gone to a small liberal arts college just for the intensity of the cliques.
And someday I'll actually learn Ancient Greek. Someday.
It really is a deep dive into Donna Tartt and her college friends/experience which was the basis for the book. Anolik has interviews with former classmates, teachers, etc. Fantastic listen.
But there's always someone.
There is a sort of person who, when they find they dislike a work nearly universally lauded by professional readers, writers, and editors, wonder what they missed.
There is another sort of person who, in the same situation, becomes certain that the praises are in error, that those who sing them must be nitwits, and that they are in possession of the objectively true evaluation of the work.
USUALLY I see this trotted out by people who bounce off, say, Faulkner or Joyce, so you're at least interesting for doing it about Tartt. But you're no more correct or insightful for your novel target.