Product Description

A misfit at an exclusive New England college, Richard finds kindred spirits in the five eccentric students of his ancient Greek class. But his new friends have a horrific secret. When blackmail and violence threaten to blow their privileged lives apart, they drag Richard into the nightmare that engulfs them. And soon they enter a terrifying heart of darkness from which they may never return ...

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #4437 in Books
• Published on: 2002-10-03
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 640 pages

Review
A thriller in the Daphne du Maurier vein, Tartt's debut novel charts the death of innocence among a group of over-privileged New England students. The narrator, Richard Papen, is easily seduced by the snobberies of the classics school at Hampden College, Vermont but - vainly - tries to hold firm against debauchery and murder. (Kirkus UK)

The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them - and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder - and might never have been if one of the gang - a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran - hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel - "Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids - while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's - and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal - and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie. (Kirkus Reviews)

About the Author
Donna Tartt was born in Greenwood, Mississippi, and educated at the University of Mississippi and Bennington College. She is a novelist, essayist, and critic. THE SECRET HISTORY has been translated into twenty-four languages.

Customer Reviews

A Nice Surprise
Given that this book was a gift from a relative whose tastes usually tend towards chick-lit and volumes produced by the crime-fiction clone machine, it was with some degree of cynicism that I approached The Secret History.

To my surprise, I very much enjoyed it. The characters are engaging and the concepts interesting. Unusually for an author critically labelled 'erudite', the prose is the vehicle of a very genuine intelligence; and is all the more commendable for it.

Negative points: Tartt's over-use of 'Deus Ex Machina' literary devices tend toward the excessive. Whilst I recognise that the author must sometimes play God to keep the plot flowing, there is only so many times that fate can intervene before the naturalism of the writing begins to suffer. Although, in this particular case, the godhand can be partialy excused by the Grecian mythological elements that are an underlying theme throughout the book, I personally feel that Tartt is often kicking The Secret History along against its will. The book does gain a momentum of sorts about half way through, however:
My other main gripe with the book is that the second half is noticeably weaker than the first. The plot reaches its climax 318 pages in, and then tails off quite dramatically. The next 382 pages kind off simmer along interminably, always promising to boil over with excitement, but never quite managing it. The result is that the conclusion is unsatisfying, and feels like Tartt is once more using her godhand to bring the story to a jarring emergency stop, lest it trundle through the wasteland of expired plots for all eternity.

Regardless of this, The Secret History is well worth reading. It has a high re-readability value: the product of strong prose and genuinely deep characters. At 700 pages, I wouldn't recommend it for anyone overly pressed for time, and its lofty intellectual aspersions might make it a little trying for the 'a-chapter-before-bed' sort of reader. However, anyone with a little time to spare should definately read The Secret History because, when all is said and done, it is a highly enjoyable book.

One of the worst books I have ever read!
I am a Historian and was curious about this book, especially since it contained many classical Greek references, but halfway through this book I kept wondering, when is it going to get good! It was had a lot of detail but no decent plot - there was nothing compelling about this book and I felt great relief once I finished it and immediately tossed to one side - I have no idea how I managed to actually finish it, given that it was so dreadful!

Approaching the inevitable peripeteia
Why 'peripeteia'? It's appropriate to use this term here, Aristotle's word for the turning point that makes a drama a drama, a tragedy a tragedy. All the participants are scholars of the ancient classics - as I was myself - and all, like the characters of ancient tragedy, have their fatal flaw. It's when this fatal flaw does emerge that the action of the book and its eventual conclusion become clear. It's a slow, icy read, but all the better for that. The evil genius, the most flawed and the most capable, has his victim in his sights and calculates his next moves, one by one, openly in his diary - but written in Latin. These are privileged young men, but privilege, ability, is no protection from human flaw