Author: Donna Tartt · Published: 1992 · Genre: Literary Thriller, Campus Novel
The Secret History tells you in its opening pages that a group of college students killed one of their own, and then makes you desperate to know how and why. It is a whydunit, a campus novel and a study of moral rot, and it did much to create the style now called dark academia. Read it if you like dense, atmospheric fiction. Skip it if you need speed or likable characters.
What it’s about Richard Papen, a lower-middle-class student from Plano, California, transfers to Hampden, a small and expensive college in Vermont. He is drawn to an exclusive group of five students who study ancient Greek with a single charismatic professor, Julian Morrow. There is Henry Winter, brilliant and cold; the elegant Francis Abernathy; the twins Charles and Camilla Macaulay; and the loud, genial Edmund “Bunny” Corcoran.
Richard lies about his background to fit in, and he gets his wish. But the group is hiding things, and their devotion to Julian’s vision of beauty and transcendence has a dark side. The prologue has already told us that one crime is coming. The rest is Richard’s account of how educated, privileged young people talked themselves into it, and what it did to them afterwards. Tartt began the novel while she was a student at Bennington College in Vermont, and Hampden is widely read as a version of it.
What works – The inverted structure. Knowing the central fact does not reduce the suspense. It redirects it. You read for motive, for character and for the question of who will crack first. – Atmosphere. Tartt’s Vermont, with its snow, cigarettes, gin and old books, is intoxicating. The book makes intellectual elitism seductive, which is exactly the trap it wants you to fall into. – Richard as narrator. He is an outsider desperate to belong, and his half-conscious complicity is the moral centre of the book. He shows you his friends with love and horror at once, and he rarely admits how much he wanted to be one of them. – Prose. Tartt writes long, controlled, richly detailed sentences, and her ear for dialogue is sharp. Many scenes, from a hungover breakfast to a drunken campus party, are small masterpieces of social observation. – The logistics of guilt. Tartt is superb on how a shared secret poisons a group: the drinking, the insomnia, the suspicion, the careful stories told to teachers and investigators, and the slow collapse of friendships that once seemed unbreakable.
What doesn’t It is long, and the second half, as guilt, alcohol and paranoia take hold, can sag badly. Some readers find the characters too privileged and self-regarding to care about, and the book’s fascination with their glamour can feel as though it shares their snobbery rather than exposing it. Julian, so central early on, drifts to the edges for much of the book. The women are thin: Camilla in particular is more an object of the men’s desire than a person with her own inner life.
There is also a question of taste. The novel takes its characters’ pretensions seriously, quoting and discussing Greek ideas at length, and readers who have no patience for campus intellectualism may find it insufferable. Tartt is aware of this, and Richard’s outsider eye helps, but not always enough.
Who should read it Readers who love atmospheric literary fiction with a crime at its heart, and anyone who has enjoyed Crime and Punishment or Brideshead Revisited. If you prefer lean thrillers, it will feel slow. If it grips you, it tends to stay with you for years, and it is well worth a second reading once you know the whole story.
Rating: 4.5/5
Photo credits — Featured image: Photo by Mat Hampson via Flickr, CC BY-SA 2.0, cropped.
