BOOK REVIEW: The Secret History by Donna Tartt
Would you kill just to fit in?
Filled with loathing for his hollow, lonely life back home in California, Richard Papen becomes a scholarship student at Hampden College, an elite liberal arts school in rural Vermont. Here, Richard discovers that the college’s “Classics” program (in other words, the program for studying Ancient Greece and Rome) is shockingly, alluringly insular: only a handful of students are accepted into the major. Furthermore, they are selected and taught exclusively by charming, enigmatic professor Julian Morrow.
These students, Richard soon learns, are named Henry Winter, Francis Abernathy, Camilla Macaulay, Charles Macaulay, and Edmund “Bunny” Corcoran. Seduced by their sophistication, intelligence, and most of all, their exclusivity, Richard is more than thrilled when they eventually welcome him into their group.
But things start to careen off the rails pretty fast. Near the middle of the book, the Classics students murder Bunny. The reasons are complicated, and by no means justifiable.
This is the crux of the book. After this point, the Classics group deteriorates rapidly. Richard is suffocated by the knowledge of what he and the others have done, but he is also suffocated by his desperate desire to remain with the friends he has fallen so dearly in love with. Camilla, Charles, and Henry trap themselves in a fucked-up triangle of abuse, alcoholism, manipulation, and what might just be love. Francis doesn’t have as dramatic of a fall, but he too is tortured by what they have done, and the idea that their sins will follow them for the rest of their lives. In general, the members of the group keep secrets, lie, and turn against each other with growing frequency.
It’s an achingly familiar story, if one removes the details: a deeply unhappy outsider does all they can to fit in with the “cool kids,” only to discover being “cool” isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. The Secret History is a philosophical, dark academia take on that classic (no pun intended) trope. Tartt is bold and brutal in her execution of what might otherwise be a rather ridiculous narrative. It’s kind of like Heathers, but hyper-intellectualized and with any overt humor removed.
And, despite what you might expect from my tongue-in-cheek descriptions, it’s fantastic.
The characters are the foundation of this book. They are fascinating.
Richard is, in my opinion, the least interesting character, and he is still interesting. He feels almost transparent, taking on whatever form will allow him to exist in the space in which he’s found himself. Yet he acknowledges this himself, as the narrator, throughout the book—complicating what might otherwise be deemed a writing fumble. I will say that Richard feels different from the rest of the Classics students because he is well-written, but he also seems more like a stand-in for a particular type of person than an actual person in his own right. There were several times throughout the book when I wondered if he could possibly even be functioning as an author stand-in, mostly because his narration converges so heavily with Tartt’s own elegant, cerebral writing style—but I won’t speculate on that any further.
Bunny is perhaps the simplest character, but he is very distinctly his own human being, in contrast to Richard. Far from the sour old bigot, he is in fact very cheerful in his own selfishness and prejudices. There is something so strikingly real about Bunny, especially when it comes to the way his dialogue is written. It’s as though you’re overhearing the gleefully insensitive remarks of an ignorant, privileged classmate. Combine the endless nagging, discriminatory comments with the months of mooching off his friends with zero remorse or intention of reimbursement, and you can almost understand why the Classics group wants to kill him. Until, of course, they actually do kill him.
Francis can be self-absorbed and spineless, but he is perhaps the easiest to pity. Very few (if any) of the cataclysms in the book happen primarily because of him. Crippled by anxiety, the sentiment that he has no responsibilities, and the belief that he cannot fend for himself, Francis relies on money and alcohol and his friends to get him through life, all of which fail him. As he is dragged deeper and deeper into the aftermath of Bunny’s murder by the questionable actions of the other Classics students, he becomes less and less able to do anything useful. It’s also worth noting that Francis is gay, and though this isn’t explored in much detail, you can tell hiding it weighs on him. One way I knew Francis was well-written was my distinct sorrow for and frustration with him, existing simultaneously; that is exactly how a person like him would make you feel in real life.
Henry is possibly my favorite character in The Secret History. If you only examine him for a few moments, he seems deceptively simple, but the layers beneath are captivating. He is cold, tidy, serious, and, it seems, a genius when it comes to Classics. Yet, throughout the book, it becomes increasingly apparent that he longs for more. He gives the impression that he is just introverted and entirely consumed by his love for the Ancient Greeks; in reality, he despairs over his disconnection from his life and those around him, and he yearns for the extreme. The visceral. As he puts it late in the book, what he wants, more than anything, is to know what it’s like “to live without thinking.” Thus, to Henry, murdering Bunny is liberation rather than imprisonment. Richard, Charles, and Francis gradually become less and less certain that Henry would never hurt anyone else in the group; in a startling contrast, Henry seemingly falls in love and starts a relationship with Camilla. While in general he is generous and polite, Henry eventually admits that he has trouble empathizing with others. All of these seemingly contradictory threads culminate, at the end of the book, in an ostensibly selfless suicide that is difficult to explain.
Charles starts the book by far the friendliest and least strange of the Classics students. Charismatic, positive, and kind, he is the only member of the group who almost immediately makes Richard feel safe. This is why his emotional collapse is so horrible to witness. By the end of the book, his guilt surrounding Bunny’s murder and his rage towards his friends (particularly Henry) for dragging him into it have more or less destroyed his life. It tore at my heart to see what Charles became: miserable, paranoid, entirely lost to alcoholism, having ruined his relationship with his sister. All, tragically, because he was probably the member of the Classics group who had the most actual regard for human life—leading his own remorse to devour him whole.
Camilla, Charles’s twin sister, is enigmatic. I’ve read many interpretations of her character. Is she a tragic victim of misogyny, objectified and used by a group full of men, only to end up trapped in a situation out of her control? Is she a normal girl, swept up by the tides of life, who loves her friends and refuses to abandon them even when morality demands otherwise? Is she cold, selfish, and manipulative—like Henry, except better at pretending to care? The first perspective is more of a sociological evaluation by readers; the second most closely resembles how Camilla portrays herself; and the third is implied subtly a couple of times, such as through Francis’s covert derogatory comments. But none of these interpretations strike me as obviously true or false. I think they are likely all true, to an extent. (Though personally, I don’t buy the take from certain corners of the internet that Camilla did absolutely nothing wrong and was entirely a victim of her circumstances. I never got the sense that she was that simple, or that innocent.) At no point during The Secret History is it clear what Camilla’s true thoughts, feelings, or motives are.
Finally, there is Julian. In a way, I feel that Julian represents the message of the entire book. He is everything an overly eager student wants in a professor: clever, eccentric, with all kinds of intriguing connections in his past. But there are warnings, from the very beginning of the book, that his glamorous exterior—and his propensity for selecting particular students and cultivating feelings of superiority within them—is not as honorable as it may initially appear. His students defend him fiercely, but when do the Classics students become less of a class and more of a cult? In the end, this wonderful professor that embraced all of his students so fully…completely abandons them. He only cares about keeping his own reputation spotless. That is what’s beneath the gleaming, bewitching mask: coldness, and self-interest, and cowardice.
The Secret History is so cynical that at times it almost feels satirical. The entire book is essentially a downward spiral. None of the characters end up happy (although I guess I can’t say that about Henry. What do I know? He’s dead). Reading this is not, as they say, a walk in the park.
Still, the writing is gorgeous—even if the reader sometimes catches more than a whiff of pretentiousness. The characters are multifaceted and vivid. And the degree of ambiguity in the text is crafted so that it forces you to wonder about the characters, making you analyze them rather than compelling you to dismiss them as incomplete. The Secret History is one of my favorite books, and I find myself coming back to it fairly regularly.
I’m going to end this review with a quote that has always stuck in my mind. Here, Richard makes a harrowing comparison between a moment in his childhood and the way he feels as he watches his friend group disintegrate:
“I remember, when I was a kid, once seeing my father strike my mother for absolutely no reason. [...] I realized that the childish impression I had always had of my father, as Just Lawgiver, was entirely wrong. We were utterly dependent on this man, who was not only deluded and ignorant, but incompetent in every way. What was more, I knew that my mother was incapable of standing up to him. It was like walking into the cockpit of an airplane and finding the pilot and co-pilot passed out drunk in their seats. And standing outside the Lyceum, I was struck with a black, incredulous horror, which in fact was not at all unlike the horror I had felt at twelve, sitting on a bar stool in our sunny little kitchen in Plano. Who is in control here? I thought, dismayed. Who is flying this plane?”
Rating: 5 out of 5 stars ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐