“The Secret History” (1992) by Donna Tartt is a murder mystery in reverse, a tale “of sin unpunished, of innocence destroyed”, of “the essential rottenness of the world.” It is all but a founding text of the dark academia aesthetic, where “dark” means more than just the colour scheme.
Like peanut butter: Some people love this book, some people hate it. I am one of the haters. It got 4.10 stars on Goodreads based on over 300,000 ratings – no mean feat.
Empathy for evil rich White people: For 591 pages I am expected to have empathy for rich White college kids at an elite school who have murdered one of their own – and got away with it! To be fair, Tartt is upfront about that. It is in the Prologue. But since I had heard such great things about the book (like with Zadie Smith, who also disappoints), and since, like the main characters, I had studied Ancient Greek at college in the 1980s (and was beguiled by Tartt’s shout-out to the Liddell-Scott Lexicon), I got suckered in. I should have stopped by page 153, but, like with a bad relationship, I soldiered on. Ugh! By then I could not not finish it.
Well-paced: Tartt does draw you in and draw you along, what the New York Times, in their over-the-top way, calls “ferociously well-paced entertainment”. There is that. The 591 pages pretty much whizz by in beach novel fashion.
Good descriptions: There are also some good descriptions, of trees, dark skies, a manhunt even. But there are also endless descriptions of characters drinking Scotch whisky, lighting cigarettes, and running their hands through their hair. At least I now know what a fifth is (= a fifth of a gallon, 757 ml, about the size of a wine bottle).
My own experience as a Liddell-Scott Lexicon user did not include murder, weekends at a Victorian mansion in the country, drinking Scotch, or snorting cocaine. Hardly. For one thing, my parents and teachers had pounded a fear of drugs into me. I wrote about Dionysian bacchanals. That was more than enough to persuade me not to faithfully recreate one, as in this book. I was taught to prize the rational, clear-sighted, philosophical side of the Greeks, not their dark, irrational, pagan side, as the characters in this book do, putting the “dark” into dark academia.
Darkness: I have no trouble with evil main characters, as in “Breaking Bad” or Western history. But I expect, want, a chilling twist of fate to bring them down, for the truth to catch up with them just when they think they are in the clear. As in the 1970s on US television, I am waiting for Columbo to say, “Oh, just one more thing.” Tartt seems to play on that expectation, despite the Prologue – but, Lucy-like, pulls back each time.
Donna Tartt in 1992.
A more accurate picture of Donna Tartt.
The Rule of Bennington:
Avoid books based on Bennington, Vermont.
Another book I read based on that town, “See Now Then” (2012) by Jamaica Kincaid (who I otherwise adore), also turned out to be terrible. What are the odds?
– Abagond, 2021.
See also:
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