Murder Will Out. And Then Some

The Secret History by Donna Tartt.  Vintage.  559 pp.  $16.95 ****

The first thing to say about The Secret History is that it is a drunk novel.  Not since the days of Faulkner, Steinbeck, and Hemingway have I read a book where so much booze is consumed, at such odd hours and so unwisely.  I’m not a prude, and I did go to college, but I’ve never been around people who drank like this.  It’s one of those books where people are living stupidly, and their stupid living has a bad end, and I ask myself why I want to read about such stupid lives.

The presenting reason is that I’d heard so much about Donna Tartt, and felt she was a major voice in fiction that I needed to experience.  (She also seems to be a weird human being.  That’s an attraction too.)  I have to say, the woman can write.  She writes great sentences, great scenes, great dialogue, and she’s created an absolutely fantastic plot.  She keeps the pages turning.  There’s something almost Dickensian about this novel (including it’s length).

The problem is that I didn’t believe its basic premise.[1]  A group of students at a small New Hampshire college gets so close that they exclude almost everyone else from their world.  That much I bought.  They’re studying classics with a charismatic professor who is so dominant that he takes over their entire curricula; it’s almost like he’s their home room teacher.  I’ve never heard of such a thing at a reputable college.

But then they go off on some Dionysian rite and somehow—in a way that was left completely vague—kill a neighboring farmer.  I’m not sure I believed that, or their apparent indifference to doing it.  Furthermore, when a member of their group who wasn’t there that night has a big mouth about what happened, might even be thinking of blackmailing one of them, they kill him too.  This is no accident.  They actually murder the guy.  The fat obnoxious guy who was always stealing things from the dorm refrigerator, eating and drinking too much, pushing everybody’s buttons with what he says: They kill him.  I know students want to do that, but do they?

I didn’t buy that basic premise.  I didn’t think it would happen.

But what happened afterwards, after they’d committed the crime and done away with the guy, seemed brilliant to me.  The guilt people suffered, the suspense they went through wondering if someone would discover what they did, the way they stopped trusting each other and all their alliances shifted: I found the second half of the book far more interesting than the first, and read it avidly.  I should say that I enjoyed the first half as well; I looked forward to reading this long book every night I sat down with it.  I just didn’t believe a couple of the plot elements.  But if you accept those things, what follows is brilliant.

There is also the problem that the group is a bunch of privileged aristocratic snots.  Our narrator isn’t; Richard Papen comes from a working class family and endures an excruciating New Hampshire winter in which he literally almost dies from the cold, or from starvation, because he doesn’t have enough (not sure I believe that either, to be honest.  The guy would have pulled himself together before he actually froze or starved to death).  Francis, the one gay character, has a wealthy and eccentric mother.  Henry—who is at the center of the group, and of the crime—seems to have almost unlimited funds.

Charles and Camilla, a brother and sister who live together off campus (have you ever heard of such a thing?) and who may actually drift into bed together now and then (here Tartt is betraying her Southern roots; she was born in Mississippi, where such behavior is de rigueur, I’m sure; I’m only surprised they didn’t bring a farm animal in with them) also seem to have plenty of money.  There’s something about this whole situation—privileged students at an elite college studying the classics and drinking themselves into oblivion on a regular basis—that is plain obnoxious.  If they suffer for what they’ve done they deserve to.

The guy that they kill, whose nickname is Bunny, does ring true as a college character.  He’s brilliant in a way, was even something of an athlete when he was younger, but at this point he’s the class slob, just can’t stop putting things in his mouth, booze, cigarettes, donuts—send this guy out for a dozen Krispy Kremes and by the time he gets back he will have eaten the whole bag and kept the change, without thinking a thing of it—and he’s also mean, a real asshole.  His meanness may reflect his disappointment at not living up to his promise.  But after his body is finally found, and the whole group goes off to his parents’ house for the funeral, and we see the deep grief that the family has, even though they’re a rather shallow group of human beings, we realize the truth about murder, and about obnoxious behavior in general.  The biggest asshole in the world was once somebody’s baby boy.

There is a melodramatic scene at the end of the novel that probably goes too far in being over the top.  I also don’t believe that a group could get together where so many people are so screwed up.  (You won’t want to go back to college after reading this book.  You’ll be glad those days are over.)  But the basic idea of this novel, of a group of people with the same consuming interest who get so close that something has to give, they turn on the weakest one, that rings true in some primal way.  Once they’ve done that, they turn on each other.

[1] I should issue a spoiler alert here, but one plot element I’m going to reveal emerges in the first line of the Prologue, so I’m not spoiling too much.