Book Review: The Secret History, by Donna Tartt

I wanted to read The Secret History at least twice, to endeavour to make it make sense for myself. In the times of easy, quick, and fleeting being the governing values that pay off, to commit twice to a book this extensive, slow, and patience-testing, felt like my own sort of dissent against the culture of instant gratification and of dumbing down. As every fan of this novel, I also have the full cast ready in my imagination for The Secret History film (even Netflix series would do, please!) which never materialized, despite its enormous cinematic potential.

The Secret History is a thriller from 1992 that is in another league compared to an average page turner of this genre. It is undoubtedly suspenseful, but additionally, Tartt is a very erudite, ambitious writer who employs a vehicle intended for the masses, while aiming at highbrow audiences. She regularly makes remarks in ancient Greek, or quips in Latin, and nonchalantly disperses allusions to Hellenic myths and classical antiquity. There are no footnotes or translation offered, we are trusted enough to figure it out on our own. It might be hard to fathom that this bizarre novel, upon publication, had an unheard-of financial and critical success for a first novel. I am not convinced it might even get published nowadays. Where we smarter readers at the beginning of the 1990s, and where did it all go downhill?

Novel takes place at a liberal arts college in Vermont called Hampden, where gifted kids with bad grades study, rich heirs, posers, problematic children from privileged backgrounds, which is closely modelled on the author's own experiences at a similar progressive New England college. Autobiographical echoes are deafening, all the chain smoking, drug taking, heavy drinking, and idolizing of the classmates, bound to become illustrious writers and artists. The adoration of the mentors, accomplished poets and philosophers, and students who were very intelligent and very mentally and emotionally fragile at the same time. Due to its setting and related themes, Tartt's novel is characterized as a campus novel.

Campus novels were always a genre that had a steady following among those who romanticize their days at the university, that liminal moment in life when the magic starts to happen: the transformation from childhood to adulthood. Such novels are intellectually ambitious, emotionally intense, with a chosen set of characters, either students or members of the staff, invested heavily in the learning and pursuit of knowledge. The campus serves as a microcosm for the world outside, and it is a lens for the critique of power relationships, hierarchy, and pretensions of academic superiority. A most beloved niche within this genre, dark academia, is atmospheric, nostalgic, decadent, and even gothic in its nature. It is populated by dark libraries, antique books, secret societies, and all-pervading mystery. It is an idealized lifestyle, very analog, without a screen in sight, filled with fountain pens, letter-writing, typewriters, leatherbound journals, autumnal colours, and endless coffee cups. There are candles and dimly lit corridors, tweed blazers and intense obsession with studying, the more obscure the topic, the better. Everyone in these invented worlds is studying classic languages and literature, poetry, philosophy, and the only moral compass is the aesthetic sensibility. If I could, I would live in such a world forever. For a very brief summer in 2016, I actually did taste a semblance of this life at the most famous university campus in the world. Humblebrag alert: no big deal reader, it was only Harvard. 😊 So I felt this imaginary, seductive world of the novel viscerally, and its biggest pull for me has always been its setting and atmosphere.

Hampden college is full of intoxicating, rich beauty, "suffused with a weak, academic light” and with “dusty libraries, and old books, and silence". Nights there were "wild with stars". Campus was isolated, green, surrounded by mountains. It is far from an idyllic setting, though. There is an abundance of recreational drug taking, and a proper dipsomania that no one perceives as a problem. Everyone is chain-smoking, burning the midnight oil, casually sleeping around, and taking themselves way more seriously than they should. This is all far beyond my comfort zone, but still, the novel has an inexplicable pull, despite its length, slow pace, and completely redundant 300 pages of slow-burning anxiety that some editor must have begged Tartt to get rid of, but without success.

The Secret History is a novel about one academic year in the life of an outsider, Richard, a scholarship kid who comes into the world of superior elitist education from California, where there is "little of interest, less of beauty". He is without family support and with very little money. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental. Right. He is an Everyman, a detached loner, an outsider until the end, who becomes obsessed with the group of students who stand apart from all the others, by their relentless pursuit of beauty and knowledge, their aesthetic superiority, moneyed lifestyle, and academic zeal. They are “intensely cultivated” and emanate “a strange cold breath of the ancient world". In them, you receive echoes of Dead Poets Society through their literary fervor and passionate love for learning, joined with dangerous fragility underneath.

There is Henry, the mastermind and effortless genius who keeps a diary in Latin and translates Milton's Paradise Lost for fun. He is a character that is hard to forget, wealthy, secretive, uptight, eccentric without wanting to be, diabolical and impressive in his speaking of seven to eight languages, all dead or near extinct at least. There is Francis, a mix between Peter Pan, a British dandy, and fated Dorian Grey. He is a closeted homosexual, insecure, overcompensating, unlucky in love and generous to a fault. There are everyone's love interests, the androgynous incestuous twins, Camilla and Charles, too beautiful and delicate to look at. No relation to the British royal couple, I am afraid. Finally, there is Bunny, an outlier, simpleton, scrounger, infantile and gregarious, academically challenged but often an astute social observer, trickster and critic. Bunny, whose family probably deserves their own book as a study of everything that could go wrong in the fabric of family life.

They are the proteges of the most charismatic professor who ever existed, Julian, a marvellous talker who initiates them into the world of classic Greek language and literature. Magnetic cult leader and his followers type of a situation, with initiation rites, secrecy, selectivity, refusals, joy of being selected, guilty secrets, middle-of-the-night phone calls, and plenty of hushed talks behind closed doors. The mastery of the novel is the feeling that we, the readers, are also allowed a limited and very elitist right to become an eavesdropper, an invisible part of that same group. We feel elated, flattered, and validated in our intellectual prowess, in the same way that Richard must have felt when the previously bolted doors of Julian's rooms opened up and admitted him into the most beautiful mise-en-scène he has ever witnessed. Enshrined air smelling of ink, jasmine, old books, and black tea served in dainty cups. The cabinet of curiosities, furnished with Japanese folding screens, silk paintings, and dozens of Mont Blanc Meisterstück pens, patience cards, crystal paperweights, and luxurious fresh flowers in the midst of winter. All of my decadent, bougie preferences duly ticked.

The insidious influence of a charismatic teacher is a prominent theme of the novel, and Tartt succeeds in painting Julian just as such, an eccentric sage, who showers the selected few with his knowledge, attention, love, and care. Julian is of a moneyed background, learned, eloquent, and intellectually seductive. He accepts as his students only those who come from affluent families, or at least seem so. In the pre-internet era, it was possible to feign riches better than nowadays. Why would Julian consider only rich kids as suitable for his lectures on morals, philosophy, and Greek myths? Was he a snob, or is there something deeper hiding within this decision? I believe that Julian understood, way before anyone else, that humanities and classics, most of all, are an untenable pursuit for anyone who actually needs to earn a living and fund their own lifestyle. So, his apparent cruelty and refusal of Richard at the beginning was him trying to save him from the future of struggle, scarcity, and material precarity.

His students all see him as a father figure, which makes the clout he has over them even stronger and more dangerous. He cuts them off from anyone else’s influence by insisting on being their only professor because “Plato had only one teacher, and Alexander.” More than their sensitivities or academic interest in Greek, the group has in common the inadequacy and instability of their families. If I had to choose a villain in this story that is far removed from such a binary division into heroes and villains, the only baddies in this tragic tale would be the parents. They are all utterly unfit for that role, being superficial, negligent, cruel, and egotistic beyond words. They dislike their children strongly, ignore them, are cold and businesslike towards them, or are simply not alive anymore to perform any of the parental roles. With a bar that low, it is easy to understand why all the characters fall for the magic and wizardry of an educated, cultured, refined professor, who gives them his superior knowledge, creates beauty out of nothing during the enchanted lessons, and sees only the best in them. It is a truth universally acknowledged that predators choose their victims carefully, always able to identify the wounded ones, or the ones who are solitary, abandoned, or weak in whatever way.

Julian Morrow is far from a predator, he is a learned, polished, cosmopolitan person whose company I would, if given a chance, readily embrace in real life. However, his effect on the youths without yet formed moral direction, desperately eager to please and impress him, was detrimental. He creates them, incites them, plays with them until it pleases his ego, but as soon as it becomes dangerous and difficult, and requires sacrifice and emotional involvement from him, he abandons them just like their own parents did. He reenacts the original cruelty of abandonment all over again. The pain is even harsher, since their parents, in their inadequacy, did not know any better. But Julian did. While their biological parents had the benefit of being stupid, educationally and intellectually limited, pathetically mediocre people, deep in their own substance addiction and blindness to their own shortcomings, Julian had none of these excuses. He is the closest you can get to a demigod, and he nevertheless behaved shamefully and cowardly towards his protégés. He is Victor Frankenstein too, the archetype of a creator who is scared of his own creation, and hence he deserts it, and commits a graver sin than anything his monsters consequently do.

What exactly did they do? Julian has spoken extensively of the pre-rational, pre-intellectual states that the ancient Greeks embraced, and extolled the virtues of the “dark, chaotic, inexplicable”. He claimed that Roman flaw was their obsession with order, reason and laws, and the subsequent denial of the darkness and unreason. While the Greeks, according to him, understood better that “bloody, terrible things are sometimes the most beautiful". In an attempt to immerse themselves in their lessons, the group then endeavours to replicate Dionysian orgies (as you do), in which they would reach complete self-abandon, delirium, and ecstasy. In a psychedelic haze of one of such attempts, rife with dressing up in bed sheets instead of clothes, assisted by alcohol, drugs, and manic night running in the forest, they jointly kill a random farmer who just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. The accident goes under the radar, however, one member of the group, the least cerebral one, sloppy, gum-chewing Bunny, starts to unravel under the pressure of the deed. But things are not that simple.

Bunny Corcoran is not an innocent, nor a particularly moral character, and his guilty conscience shares nothing with Raskolnikov's. He is wicked and corrupted in his own way, envious, deeply materialistic, prone to torturing others, mocking their flaws and finding strength in the fact that he, unlike others, does have a family. The Corcorans are a rotten bunch, the family version of Tom and Daisy from The Great Gatsby. “They were careless people, Tom and Daisy- they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated into their money or their vast carelessness”. Reckless people, old money wealth of Connecticut once, and now shameless grifters who dumped their brood of children onto others to fund and help them through life, in a lavish manner, naturally. They make an epic mess and graciously let others pick up after them, acting all condescending and haughty.

Bunny was over his head and unable to keep up with the group, with numerous learning disabilities but still lords his old money background over them and behaves entitled to free meals, trips, favours, and homework always done for him. After the murder, he became even keener to manipulate the situation to profit financially from his classmates. He sponges off the others mercilessly, blackmails, threatens, taunts, and demands extravagant trips to Italy and France, wants them to fund expensive stationery, clothes, and other luxurious gifts. Unable to tolerate his constant threats, nor to pay him anymore, the group pushes him off the cliff and kills him as well. With his murder, the novel begins, and there is neither teasing nor mystery there. We know from the very prologue who dies, and who killed him. What follows is an agonizing, unputdownable "whydunit".

There it is, unlikely heroes, a pretentious group of predominantly rich children, obnoxious and precocious Hellenophiles. Ink-writing, sinister and dramatic bibliophiles exposed and dissected in all their hubris. They should be easy to hate, and this should be a morally open-and-shut case. But their subsequent fear of being detected, their self-imposed punishment and complete mental unravelling and disintegration is undeniably gripping. Their sins, first an accidental murder but the second one very much deliberate, may have gone unpunished by law, but their lives were destroyed by self-loathing and self-inflicted agonies. There is catharsis. It is hard to feel for Bunny, since he was the least charming character in the group, and his family can only be thoroughly despised. Even during the ordeal of his funeral, the reader would struggle to feel empathy for that dysfunctional, egotistical to the core family. I would argue that they could be equally blamed for his demise as the murderers.

Akin to Humbert Humbert from Lolita, or to the creature from Frankenstein, you find yourself mostly rooting for the monsters in Tartt's novel. Why is that, and what does that say about morals as not being written in stone but being very slippery and amorphous? This is a morally ambiguous novel, if there ever was one. Julian's own professed attitude towards shedding blood in classical texts is misleading. He claims that “Bloodshed is a terrible thing…but the bloodiest parts of Homer and Aeschylus are often the most magnificent.” His students idolize him and echo that “Death is the mother of beauty.” Is he partially responsible for what they did? What was his duty or responsibility towards them? Instead of reporting them to the authorities or attempting to undo and unteach the damage already done, he ghosts them and disappears in the middle of the semester without any trace, never to be seen by any of them. His escape from the college once the horrible truth gets revealed, sheds a poor light on him, on all his lofty ideals, impeccable taste and breeding, and besmirches the gravity of all the ancient texts he could quote by heart. No amount of Homer, Virgil or Shakespeare atones for a crooked heart.

There are countless aspects to bring to light from this novel, and I have only lightly scratched the surface here. This is one of those novels that leaves you antsy, dissatisfied, with more questions and doubts than answers and certainties. Abandon all hope of a neat closure. It is a painful Bildungsroman brimming with a sense of loss and betrayal, huge promise gambled away, and disappointment with the adult world. I imagine that Tartt's elevator pitch for this novel must have been “What if Holden Caulfield went to college?” This is also a novel to reread, in erratic intervals, preferably in the smokey autumn or in the depths of frigid winter, since it lends itself perfectly to such cruel months. It is layered and complex enough to offer manifold facets upon every new reading. I have read it first time for the thrill of mystery, for the plot, whathappensnextism, and for understanding why this is such a famous book. The second time, I read it for the atmosphere, for the beauty of language, to translate finally all those, dispersed like confetti, Latin and Greek phrases and nuggets of erudition. I went fishing for the occasional perfectly chosen word ("malcontent", “academic monotone”) or a phrase (“I did not care for this conversational turn"), and for everything that Julian, who also broke my heart, ever taught. Who knows what the next reading will unearth? Can't wait.