Title: The Secret History
Author: Tartt, Donna
Published by: Penguin
Year: 1993
First published: Knopf, 1992
Date reviewed: 07.04
ISBN: 0-140-16777-3

Let’s be honest: despite the “bestseller” label and the eulogies on the back cover, this is far from being a great book. Here are echoes of many powerful classics – “The Magus“, “Crime and Punishment“, “Catcher in the Rye“, “Lord of the Flies” (you can add more of your own) – but only echoes. At least two extended sections of this novel add nothing to the story and only bulk to the book (for those who’ve read the book I’m thinking particularly of the accounts of Richard’s winter and Bunny’s funeral). There is also much space devoted to the characters’ pursuit of booze and pills, none of which is actually relevant to the plot. Strip all this away and you’re left with the makings of a good short story rather than a 600+ page novel.

But the fundamental problem is that too many central aspects of the plot just don’t work. The reasons for the group of main characters being together, and why they accepted the narrator (Richard) into their class, are glossed over. The Magus character (Julian), whose influence is supposed to be the driving force behind the characters’ actions, is only sketchily described. Worst of all, the only explanation offerred for the strange pivotal event of the whole book, on which everything else depends, invites us to believe it was indeed supernatural. Nothing else in the book invokes the supernatural, and its use in this way seems attributable only to a desire by the author to increase the weirdness quotient of her novel.

So we are left with a good, if derivative, idea for a plot, which one suspects proved too much of a challenge to an inexperienced novelist. The cynic would suggest Tartt targeted the bestseller genre by adding lashings of superfluous gothic fantasy and college kid drink-and-drugs culture, instead of concentrating on developing her characters and plot. It all goes to show you have to take the back cover quotes from the heavyweight newspaper reviews with a large helping of salt.