Review: The Secret History

This book was first published in 1992, attracting a great deal of stir - several weeks on the NY Times best seller list, and a wide variety of reviewer opinion, much of it favorable. According to an article appearing in the online magazine Salon.com, some of the negative comments sprang from simple jealousy - a first novel published by a previously unknown author, with a mind boggling number of famous names dropped in the acknowledgments, which then went on to remarkable success in sales. According to the comments on Salon, the book contains numerous references to classical Greek & Latin literature. I confess I am almost totally unfamiliar with these works. One need not be familiar with the various classical references, whatever they are, to be completely engrossed in the book.

A ten year silence followed the publication of "The Secret History," and Tartt's second novel has recently been published, leading to a renewed flurry of attention to her first book, and a new trade paperback edition complete with an interview with the author, and a book discussion group guide.

All the attention given to the author intrigued me - somehow I missed this book in its first release. I would certainly classify this as suspense fiction - for me, this fell into the "can't put it down" category, and I was irritated when appointments, meals, bedtime, etc. intruded on my reading time. I finished the nearly six hundred pages in a little over a day and a half.

However, is this a mystery? The reader knows from the first paragraph who the dead body is, and before the second page of the prologue is complete, we also know who the perpetrators are. So not a "whodunit?" then. However the "why" remains a large question - and the motivation of several characters remains unclear - perhaps even after the reader has completed the book.

Set in a small liberal arts college in rural Vermont in the fairly recent past - it seemed to me action was set in the mid seventies. Narrated by a student who has enrolled there attempting to escape a fairly bleak childhood & adolescense in California's silicon valley.

He enrolls in the college's classical curriculum - led by one professor, who teaches virtually all the all the classes taken by his students, conducting these classes in a kind of tutorial style in his small rather luxurious suite of offices, and limiting the enrollment to a very tiny handful of students - only six during the action of the novel.

The narrator is a relative latecomer to this insulated group, as a reader, I was alarmed much earlier than he was to the ominous nature of the activities of the others. There are country weekends spent at a home owned by the family of one of the other students, mysterious smells in the house, comings & goings at odd hours, all contributing to a growing sense of unease on my part.

Then four of the others reveal a truly horrific secret - our narrator participates in the concealment of this fact. The sixth member of the group is kept in the dark, but eventually learns the truth, and begins a type of irritating, malicious blackmail. I'm not revealing an important secret when I tell you that the other five kill him.

In the prelude to his death, I found myself wishing I could shout at him - "Shut up! for God's sake! Can't you see how dangerous these kids are?" But he can't or won't shut up, and it costs him his life.

In the aftermath, there is a surreal weekend of the funeral spent in the home of the dead boy's parents, the deterioration of the emotional stability of all the others, and eventually another death.

Lurking behind all these events is the character of the professor - who truly would rival Svengali, Dickens' Fagan, the pied piper of Hamlin, the instigator of the Children's Crusade and other manipulative onlookers as one who leads others, especially the young, to their ruin, and disclaims all responsibility when the chips are down.

In addition to the manipulation of the professor, I felt that the startling amount of drug & alcohol abuse described was a major factor in what transpired, and I remain puzzled that the author portrays this part of the story in a distressing matter of fact style. All in all, I did not like the seven major characters very much at all, yet I retained a type of concern for all of them, with the possible exception of the teacher. Various supporting characters, particularly several young women who are also students at the school as well as the mother of one member of the group, are much more admirable than the main protagonists.

Other reviews have called on comparisons to Golding's "Lord of the Flies," Salinger's "Catcher in the Rye," Meyer Levin's "Compulsion," and the Hitchock film "Rope" but as a reader I saw a more compelling comparison to Conrad's "Heart of Darkness." The final stop in the journey along this tragic chain of events is very, very dark indeed.

Reprinted with permission. Do Not repost without permission from the author, Woodstock - RAM

Book Review: The Secret History