Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #16206 in Books
• Published on: 2005-06-06
• Binding: Paperback
• 576 pages

Nigel Slater, Word
`One of my favourite books of all time . . . Her prose is incredibly rich and intricate, almost baroque'

Observer
`Beautifully measured prose that sets the scene draws us into the extraordinary story that lingers long in the mind'

Irish Independent
`You leave the book mesmerised by the world … Brilliant'

Customer Reviews

A little lost
Donna Tartt has chosen some tough acts to follow with her second book: William Faulkner, Harper Lee, Carson McCulloch, some of the greats of literature have set their work in America's South and at least two have chosen as their subject girls on the edge of puberty. Perhaps it's unfair to judge Tartt's book against these, but the comparisons are inevitable. Having said that, she does a fair job. The strength of her writing (as with many female authors in my opinion) is her eye for detail. She recreates a small Mississippi town in the 1970s, right down to the boiled peanuts and Country Club swimming pool, the smiley face t-shirts and Wacky Pack stickers. The trap of such writing, entertaining though it is, is that the setting becomes the story.

The book concerns the Cleve family, in particular Harriet Cleve Dufresne, a clever neglected child of Southern gentility on their uppers. Harriet's older brother, Robin, is found dead when Harriet is a baby, a blow from which Harriet's mother and her marriage never really recover. Harriet resolves to find the killer of her brother (although we never discover if his death is nothing more than a tragic accident) and the story takes us through the summer of her investigation and the consequences of this for a family of backwoods drug dealers, the Ratliffs.

And that's really all there is to it. If you enjoy reading meticulous descriptions of the houses of each of Harriet's many aunts, exchanges between Harriet and her devoted follower Hely, the bizarre family life of the Ratliff brothers and their permanently-on-the-edge-of-death grandmother, Gum, then this is the book for you. In my opinion, these kinds of pen portraits, undriven by the necessities of a plot, work best when they are refined and condensed, a la Carson McCullers for example. Otherwise, it can become a pointless ramble the reader has to wade through to get to the next event. This might matter less if all the description had some thematic point - to illustrate the huge social changes that were going on at that point in American history for example - but the town, Alexandria, and the Cleves exist in a vacuum, so the exquisite detail just become an end in itself.

In summary: well written, entertaining, but lacks edge and clarity through weak plotting and lack of thematic development.

a dreadful, turgid, overwritten bore of a book
Need one say more? This is the slowest and most boring book ever written. The Secret History was a treat, but this? Complete trash. The main premise is absurd, the characters feeble, the eventual denouement (if one can call it that) is weak and not in the slightest bit interesting or exciting (especially if you've waded through hundreds of waffling pages to get to it). Everything about the Little Friend is poor. I rarely write a review, but simply had to save other readers from wasting time and money on this sprawling and awful book. Shame on you, Ms Tartt, for writing it (doesn't your computer have a delete key?) and shame on the publishers (and editor) for letting it out.

The Little Friend
Having adored Tartt's first book, The Secret History, it was in an apoplexy of excitement that I opened her second. At first the rich, multi-layered text (poetic, never patronizing) didn't disappoint. The story on the other hand, did. Wandering aimlessly between characters, The Little Friend unfolds on the weakest of plots barely and irritatingly sustained through a multiplicity of changing points of view. It's hard to understand whose story this is, and even harder to care. The beautifully crafted sentences simply can't sustain the lack of substance. Sadly this novel has all the signs of having been the product of perspiration rather than inspiration.