Book Summary and Reviews of The Secret History by Donna Tartt

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Cathryn Conroy

This Psychological Thriller Is Everything a Novel Should Be: Great Literature and a Page-Turner
This psychological thriller is everything a novel should be: great literature and a page-turner that will keep you up past your bedtime.

Written by Donna Tartt, this is the story of six college students in the 1980s who attend the small (fictional) Hampden College in Hampden, Vermont. They are all studying ancient Greek—to the exclusion of almost everything else—with a charismatic, brilliant, and mysterious professor they think of as a deity. The six become such close friends and are so engrossed in ancient Greece that what seems like eccentricity to others is actually more cult-like.

This is not a spoiler because it's revealed in the first chapter: Five of them murder the sixth, a young man named Edmund whom everyone calls Bunny.

Why they kill their good friend Bunny is the focus of the first half of the book. The stunning, powerful, page-turning second half is the effect the murder has on the five students as they crumble emotionally, psychologically, and physically. In addition, we witness the slow disintegration of their friendship as they each process the haunting guilt they feel and become consumed with worry about being caught.

While the plot is highly implausible, the superb, literary writing keeps the story together and moving forward. It is told in the first person at some future date by Richard Papen, the newest member of the group, a scholarship student who has transferred from a college in California. Richard is a classic fish out of water, a stranger to New England, a poor kid among rich ones, a public high school grad when the others went to posh prep schools. He is so embarrassed by his background that he tells an intricate web of lies in which he is occasionally caught. Richard is so needy for friendship and belonging that he is unthinkingly pulled into this dangerous, precarious snare.

While I was horrified by the students' murderous actions and thoughts, I was also strangely drawn into their lives and bizarre situation as they struggle with deep questions of morality, good vs. evil, and surviving their own misguided and troubling consciences.

Cloggie Downunder

a compelling read
“…people never seemed to notice at first how big Henry was. Maybe it was because of his clothes, which were like one of those lame but curiously impenetrable disguises from a comic book (why does no one ever see that ‘bookish’ Clark Kent, without his glasses, is Superman?). Or maybe it was a question of his making people see. He had the far more remarkable talent of making himself invisible – in a room, in a car, a virtual ability to dematerialise at will – and perhaps this gift was only the converse of that one: the sudden concentration of his wandering molecules rendering his shadowy form solid, all at once, a metamorphosis startling the viewer.”

The Secret History is the first novel by American author, Donna Tartt. At the age of nineteen, Richard Papen goes to Hampden College in Vermont, primarily to get away from his parents and his depressingly boring hometown of Plano, CA. Having done two years of study in Ancient Greek, he jumps at the opportunity to join an exclusive class of five students studying The Classics under the very selective Julian Morrow.

Richard is somewhat dazzled by his fellow students: Henry Winter, dark-suited, stiff, aloof and extremely intelligent; Francis Abernathy, angular and elegant; the beautiful twins, Charles and Camilla Macaulay, and Bunny Corcoran, loud and cheery. Never does he dream that within a few months, one of their number will be dead.

At the centre of this book, both figuratively and literally, is a murder. The narrative is split into two: what led up to the murder, and the aftermath. The story is told by Richard some nine years after he went to Vermont. Tartt advances her story at a slow and careful pace; her characters, flawed and not necessarily appealing, develop as Richard gets to know them; her descriptive prose expertly evokes the atmosphere of the New England college.

So naturally do events lead into one another that the reader occasionally needs to step back and think: this is murder they are so matter-of-factly discussing. Black humour relieves the tension: the twins, upbraided for their failure to plan a meal, retort “Well, if you wake up intending to murder someone at two o’clock, you hardly think what you’re going to feed the corpse for dinner”.

As well as giving the reader plenty to think about (the value of life, self-preservation, friendship any loyalty), there is a plot with a few interesting turns and a quite unexpected climax. Tartt combines the story-telling talent of Stephen King with prose worthy of Wallace Stegner: the result is a compelling read that will stay with the reader long after the last page is turned.

Other books by Donna Tartt at BookBrowse