Donna Tartt’s The Secret History disappointed me.
I still loved it.
Donna Tartt uses her masterful grasp of language and dialogue to create a wonderfully evil murder mystery; except the twist is, it’s from the perspective of the murderers. The Secret History a story of terrible people doing terrible things; a cautionary tale about the dangers of romanticizing and blind dedication to aesthetic. Truly, a riveting story ahead of it’s time. The only caveat is that the book carries some dark secrets of it’s own, in fact, the whole book might just be one of the most elaborate lies in contemporary fiction.
Might also just be a book, though.
Everyone says to never judge a book by it’s cover, but fuck it; if it’s on the book somewhere then it affects my reading of the story. This is why I never read the blurb, because it never truly captures the real essence of the book. That sounds douchey, and it is.
For some reason, I remember that long ago when I bought this book, I distinctly remember flipping it over and looking at the back. Truly, a critical error. The back of my copy reads and follows:
“Under the influence of their charismatic classics professor, a group of clever, eccentric misfits at an elite New England college discover a way of thinking and living that is a world away from the humdrum existence of their contemporaries. But when they go beyond the boundaries of normal morality they slip gradually from obsession to corruption and betrayal, and at last—inexorably—into evil.”
–The Secret History
Okay, I really don’t feel that it’s a stretch to say this gave me a false impression of the contents of the book. This didn’t hugely affect my experience reading the story, but I was certainly waiting a long time for promises that were never really delivered upon.
The book is massive, totaling in at five-hundred and fifty-nine pages in my edition, the book is not a beach read by any means. That is not to say a long book is inherently a bad thing, but sometimes this book made me feel like I was watching a television show that was just padding for time.
Part 1: Beginnings
The Everyday World
The Secret History tells the story of Richard Papen, from his own unreliable perspective. He’s is from Plano, California. It is not a fact he takes much pride in.
Richard barely got into Hampden (the fictional college the novel takes place at), but nobody can know that. He’s dirt poor, so scholarships are almost exclusively paying for his education. At an elitist college like Hampden, that’s a terrible embarrassment. He has no passion, no purpose. Richard’s parents wanted him to go to med school, but due to a sensitive stomach and no real desire to be a doctor, he drops that pretty quickly. He enjoys Greek, but never really hones that particular skill enough for it to become his life’s calling.
In a quote from early in the book, he quotes a journal entry when speaking of Plano; written when he was eighteen,
There is to me about this place a smell of rot, the smell of rot that ripe fruit makes. Nowhere, ever, have the hideous mechanics of birth and copulation and death—those monstrous upheavals of life that the Greeks call miasma, defilement—been so brutal or painted up to look so pretty; have so many people put up so much faith in lies and mutability and death death death.
-The Secret History, 11
All in all, Richard’s life sucks.
Until one miraculous evening, after fighting with his parents, he stumbles upon a brochure to a private liberal arts college in the misty depths of Vermont. After making some desperate phone calls and pulling a few strings, Richard ends up at a dusty bus station at the crack of dawn. What follows is a flurry of advisor meetings, happy nights spent in his apartment, and a curious meeting with a strange group of people that Richard is unable to shake from his head.
From a more macro scale, the baby steps of the book serve to endear us to plucky ol’ Richard; he’s our underdog, a young man down on his luck and looking for a direction in life. Richard is our protagonist after all, and what is a protagonist without starting in a boring, everyday world. Now comes the call to adventure.
Richard, as I mentioned before, finds himself near or around a few peculiar students several times in the early pages of the book. These students are odd, a bit rude, and generally unapproachable.
For ol’ Richard, it’s love at first sight.
Henry Winter is cold (hah), mean, and a genius beyond the scope of imagination. He is furiously smart, impeccably dedicated to whatever goal he sets his mind to, and he has almost infinite amounts of money at his disposal. He is the ringleader of this mysterious group. Also, he’s probably my favorite character in the novel. I always tend to gravitate to the meaner, more practical characters in a story (I have a fine relationship with my father, thank you very much), and he stands out as the most interesting character to dissect as far as intentions go.
Francis Abernathy is (in my opinion) the most likeable of the group. He’s aloof, hard to read, and equally as financially privileged as Henry, but there is a certain softness to him that none of the other characters (save Camilla, kinda) really have. His “big secret” is that he’s gay, and he frequently tries to sleep with both Richard and the other members of the main cast. I don’t really like the way that reads, but Tart definitely was writing to a stereotype. He’s not villainized or anything, and the gay kiss scene is kinda hot, honestly. Still a bit problematic today, I’d say. Not exactly “queer representation” in the modern sense.
Camilla and Charles I’m grouping together, because they do everything (everything) together. These two are the first of the group to not come from immense wealth, but they still maintain immense privilege. Charles is funny, approachable, and generally a good person. He is prone to occasional spiraling and dark moods, but hey, who isn’t these days. Camilla is the love interest, pretty much. She’s kind, pretty, and capable; but you knew all that when I said she was the love interest. She has her moments, sure. But, she has disappointingly little to do and say when compared with the four other main (male) characters in the story.
Finally, there’s Bunny. His real name is Edmund Corcoran, and try not to get too attached to him. We find out in the prologue that he dies, so it’s not like I’m really spoiling anything (not that I give a hoot about spoilers). He is a bit of a martyr, but also a bit of a dick. He is a pauper, coming from a family of paupers. Mostly mooching off Henry (the two are childhood friends) to get by, Bunny begins the story at about a six on my likeability scale. Due to some —shall I say unforeseen?— events, Bunny descends that likeability scale rapidly from a tentative six to a four then a two and finally, by proxy of a forty eight foot drop, he disappears from the world of the living altogether.
The Plot Moves, for Now…
Now that the core dramatis personae are out of the way, we can move the story along a bit, δόξα τω θεώ…
So, Richard is now at a college that fulfills him, but now he’s got to pick his classes. Due to his prior two years taking Ancient Greek at a local college back home, Richard again tries to go for the Ancient Greek class at Hampden. He is told off by his advisor, who says there is no way the professor is going to let him into that class. Richard, see, is a bit of a prick. He takes this as essentially a challenge, and through some elbow grease his is able to at least meet this mysterious professor. The professor is none other than Mr. Julian Morrow. He’s the so-called charismatic classics professor from the blurb. Julian is also somewhat of a main character in this novel.
Not really, but everyone pretends like he is.
Julian intrigues Richard, and he ends up more determined than ever to join the fabled Ancient Greek class. Rest assured, reader, he will join them soon. After bumping in the elusive and aloof class of five students as they are working on homework, Richard finds himself accidentally correcting them on some translation work they are struggling with. Some in the group find him charming, namely Bunny. Others in the group find him less charming, namely everyone else.
Bunny takes Richard out to lunch, a generous gesture. Although Bunny, we see, is kind of terrible. When he “takes” Richard to lunch, he orders an immense amount of food and pisses off the entire restaurant with his loud homophobic ranting. Like I said, he descends the likeability scale rather quickly. After the obnoxious display of character at lunch, Bunny then realizes he’s forgotten his wallet at home. Kindly, an embarrassed Bunny asks Richard to foot the bill for this one.
Except, the thing is, Richard is flat broke. Not only does he receive almost no financial help from his parents, he also has virtually no money to begin with. Only, Bunny and the rest of the group doesn’t know that. At the table, the situation grows tense once Bunny realizes that neither he nor Richard have the funds to pay for dinner. The bill is massive, and the waiter is pissed. Bunny steps out of the room, saying he’s going to call Henry. We are left with Richard to wait, and it starts to seem like Bunny may have ditched him. Luckily, after a few more minutes, Bunny returns, successful in contacting Henry. Henry drives over, paying for the food and offering to drive both (now very drunk) men home. Crisis averted, right?
Well… Bunny is dropped off first, for a very specific reason. As Richard sobers up in the back, Henry explains that Bunny has pulled this trick before. See, like I said, Bunny is a pauper. He mooches off people in order to get things he wants. Fancy suits, drunken dinners, and trips to Italy. I like the way Tartt unveils the underhanded nature of the situation:
“It’s his fault.”
“But—”
“He told you he was taking you out. Didn’t he?”
His voice had a slightly accusatory tone. “Well, yes,” I said.
“And just happened to leave his wallet at home.”
“It’s all right.”
“It’s not all right,” Henry snapped. “It’s a terrible trick. How were you to know? He takes it on faith that whoever he’s with can produce tremendous sums at a moment’s notice. He never thinks about these things, you know, how awkward it is for everyone. Besides, what if I hadn’t been at home?”
“I’m sure he really just forgot.”
“You took a taxi there,” said Henry shortly. “Who paid for that?”
Automatically I started to protest, and then stopped cold. Bunny had paid for the taxi. He’d even made sort of a big deal out of it.
“You see,” said Henry. “He’s not even very clever about it, is he? It’s bad enough he does it to anyone but I must say I never thought he’d have the nerve to try it on a perfect stranger.”
TSH, 61
This is the first inkling from Tartt that there is more to these characters than meets the eye. Undeterred by the incident with Bunny, Richard moves on, forgiving and forgetting. Maybe, if he’d tried to stop Bunny then, tried to change that core greed that was at the center of his being, things would’ve ended up different.
Σοφώτατον χρόνος· ἀνευρίσκει γὰρ πάντα.
“Time is the wisest; for it always finds out” – Pericles
Padding for Time
After this incident, and probably because of it, the group begins to accept Richard. Weekends in the country at Francis’s country house become a common occurrence. Slowly, through parties in the yard and laughter in the sun, Richard begins to feel like a member of the group. Out in the country, Richard is happier than he’s ever been. I mean, hell, an isolated mansion in the country with my friends sounds like heaven. Pacing wise, the time in the country doesn’t raise good memories for me as the reader. It slows to a crawl, practically asking the me to sit around and watch these snobby college kids sit around and make cocktails. Also, I’m extremely jealous.
I feel a dichotomy here; on one hand, I like the “vibes” of this little interlude in the country. On the other hand, it took me a week to read. Entertaining writing can still be bad pacing. The section out in the country feels cozy, fun, and was honestly one of my favorite parts of the book in retrospect. In retrospect. Pacing issues often only become clear once the whole package has been digested. It has good vibes, but bad pacing. This is a problem that will soon be repeated even more egregiously in the following chapter.
This chapter was probably my least favorite part of the book. Richard’s winter in Hampden is traumatizing for him. It’s all about twenty pages of what I will not very delicately call misery porn. For stupid reasons, Richard is basically homeless during a hellish Vermont winter, and I get to tag a long for the entire thing. Everyone else leaves, too, so there’s no escape.
The whole ordeal takes about fifty-five pages, and it took me a week to read. Call me a slow reader all you want, but note there were other sections of the book I burned through in a night that were double or triple the length of Richard’s first trials and tribulations. How desperate his situation becomes is almost comedic in its brutality. Ol’ Richie literally lives in an empty warehouse with a hole in the ceiling for the entire winter. I’m not a scientist, but he should probably be dead.
Missteps on Missteps
Donna Tartt is a better writer than me, I’ll be the first to admit. But, introducing us to all these interesting characters, getting us invested in their relationship with Richard, and then ripping them away (some for as long as fifty pages) was definitely an interesting strategy. Fifty pages out of a five-hundred and fifty page book may not seem like a lot, but when you’re just meeting characters, the impressions are crucial. This fifty page gap kills a lot of the momentum for me, especially as far as Charles and Camilla go. Francis is somewhat spared, and Henry basically escapes this unscathed in terms of development.
One main problem I have with Tartt’s writing here is that she has to pause the progression of the plot in order to develop the characters. We do find out later that there is more going on during the first few chapters than Richard knows about. For my first read, it really felt as if the plot grinded to a halt.
This doesn’t really affect my Character or Plot Scores, but it certainly dampens the overrall impression of the characters.
This long pause distances me from the other cahracters, due to the heavy focus on Richard and how he’s feeling. Not to understate the impact, I feel really bad for Richard here, but the torture he undergoes after everyone leaves becomes comedic after a certain point. Like, how the hell am I supposed to relate to Richard here, any sane person would go to a homeless shelter. Yes, it was all a point of pride for him to deal with his horrible living situation, but the fact that he doesn’t literally die is too much to ask from my suspension of disbelief. Ego aside, the human instinct to not freeze to death is stronger than Tartt portrays here. It really feels like Tartt started out thinking the whole thing would be very tortured artist, but it all feels a little silly by the end of it.
Richard ends up with pneumonia after his little stint as an icicle for three months, and you’d think that once he recovered all his new friends would just be dying to see him.
Yeah, you’d think. This is the most annoying of the three annoying plotlines that start around page seventy and end around page one-hundred and sixty. Both Richard and the reader are increasingly done with everyone’s shit. All the characters evaporate from Richard’s life as soon as they arrived. Θεοί! I was so annoyed by this entire bit of the story. The thing is with this trope (the whole, all the side characters start inexplicably ignoring the main character) is that it isn’t as cool as it sounds on paper.
Momentum just ends up committing suicide as the entire story just fucking stops. The main character is always like, “gee whiz, this is annoying,” and it’s like, I as the reader know that eventually the side characters are probably going to come around and explain what the fuck has been going on. The whole thing is just a delayed conclusion and it’s very annoying.
I do not like to be edged by my stories!
Part 2: Signs of Life, or Death
Cigarettes in the Dark
Regardless, all bad things must come to an end. Tartt mercifully ushers us out of this phase of the story when Henry returns from Italy. I know that I, as the reader, was anxiously awaiting for the plot to do something interesting other than lie there and moan indistinctly. Henry to the rescue! The whole thing is very dark academia, with Henry asking a mystified Richard to listen to his dark and brooding story while chain-smoking cigarettes. I love this part, it captures a certain je ne sais quoi that I adore in stories. Like, I was annoyed by the blindfold being over my eyes for the past hundred and fifty pages, but παντοδύναμοι Θεοί! It feels really good to see that blindfold begin to slip away.
Anticipation is a haughty bitch; she giveth, and she taketh away. As Henry begins his long expository monologue, we find out what everyone else has been up to while Richard did his best shivering his way to an early grave.
I adore this monologue, and Henry is truly the saving grace here. Here’s the Sparknotes summary of what he tells Ol’ Richie:
So, basically, it’s all Julian’s fault. Julian (in his one real contribution to the plot) introduces the intrepid Greek class to the Bakcheia, otherwise known as the Dionysian mysteries. Henry and the gang (minus Richard, because he wasn’t as dedicated to the alpha-chad grindset, or something) became obsessed with pulling off the modern equivalent.
That, I hear you saying, is absolutely insane. I would retort that its very dark academia of them.
Henry, when justifying his obsession, says,
“After all, the appeal to stop being yourself, even for a little while, is very great,” he said. “To escape the cognitive mode of experience, the transcend the accident of one’s moment of being. There are other advantages, more difficult to speak of, things which ancient sources only hint at and which I myself only understood after the fact.”
“Like what?”
“Well, it’s not called a mystery for nothing,” said Henry sourly
TSH, 164
Even I, a paragon of facts and logic, was a little tempted by this manifesto.
People —more people than you think— are often increasingly dissatisfied with the humdrum of their daily routines. Totally escaping that routine, baptizing the soul and coming out the other side wholly new, is tempting. This brings us, I feel, to the crux of what the book is really about. The Secret History is the story of people who have everything, but want more. It is the story of a quest for the picturesque. Henry, Francis, the twins, Bunny, and Richard could all very well live out their four years at Hampden in relative peace and quiet, spending weekends in the country and studying Greek every afternoon. After college, they could all go their separate ways, occasionally meeting for drinks or to talk about old times. Get married, get a job, have kids. In other words, a normal life. A happy life.
Or, they could try something else.
Divine Academia
“We should make all speed to take flight from this world to the other, and that means becoming like the Divine so far as we can, and that again is to become righteous with the help of wisdom… In the Divine there is no shadow of unrighteousness, only the perfection of righteousness, and nothing is more like the Divine than any one of us who becomes as righteous as possible”
Plato, Theaetetus 176a-c
There is an Ancient Greek idea that the mind was where mortals could get closest to the Divine. Pursing that mental enlightenment was the ultimate goal of every being, according to Plato. He, in essence, is saying here that the aesthetic of Divinity is worth pursuing, because that is how mortals can achieve a purer state of being.
When Julian is teaching his Greek class at Hampden, he says this to them:
Do you remember what we were speaking of earlier. of how bloody, terrible things are sometimes the most beautiful?” he said. “It’s a very Greek idea, and a very profound one. Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it. And what could be more terrifying and beautiful, to souls like the Greeks or our own, than to lose control completely? To throw off the chains of being for an instant, to shatter the accident of our mortal selves?… And that, to me, is the terrible seduction of the Dionysiac ritual. Hard for us to imagine. That fire of pure being.
TSH, 42
Losing yourself, the accident of being, throwing off the chains of existence.
Sound familiar?
Both Henry and Julian’s obsession stems from the same source: the ancients themselves. Henry and Julian strive to cultivate the same aesthetic within themselves; the brooding silence, the quiet academia, the looming darkness in their souls. Throughout the novel, Henry and Julian are shown to have an almost Father-Son relationship. No other members of the Greek class are this close to Julian, and that feels thematically important. Julian and Henry are the closest, Julian plants the seed of obsession in Henry, and Henry spreads this to the rest of the class.
So, what is the result of this Dionysian mystery? What, dear reader, is the fruit of this labor?
I looked down at my hand and saw it was covered with blood, and worse than blood. Then Charles stepped forward and knelt at something at my feet, and I bent down, too, and saw that it was a man. He was dead. He was about forty years old and he had on a yellow plaid shirt […] and his neck was broken, and, unpleasant to say, his brains were all over his face […] I was drenched in blood and there was even blood on my glasses.
TSH, 169
Y’know, maybe those chains of being were put there for a reason.
What now?
From here, the plot moves at a more reasonable speed. Here is where I went from liking the book to loving it. See, when Henry and the group did their little ritual, they neglected to include Richard. They didn’t trust him, plain and simple. At first, Richard was the only one excluded. At first.
Bunny was a problem of a different color, though. Henry wanted to include him, but Bunny’s soul just didn’t lend itself to being purified. A soul is purified through certain, difficult rituals. Fasting, intoxication, and ritual dancing were all the basic essence of Dionysian mystery. Bunny was able to excel at one of these, but he miserably failed at the others. He had no discipline, so fasting was off the table, and he was too self-conscious to really commit to the dancing. Every time Henry felt the group was on the cusp of slipping into a frenzy, Bunny would always ruin it by cracking a joke or doing something oafish. So, Bunny got booted.
After Bunny was ejected, slipping into frenzy was almost easy.
The product of that frenzy was where things got tricky. Murder is (so I’m told) a very difficult thing to pull off. Henry and the gang circumvent this little oopsie-daisy! by doing something rather clever.
They just fucking leave.
Driving home in blood soaked togas and a thousand-yard stare, the gang stumbles into Henry’s apartment and freaks the fuck out. Well, guess who is waiting for them when they stumble into Henry’s dark apartment. So Bunny, the hilarious prankster that he is, is waiting in Henry’s apartment to scare him for not including him on this whole Dionysian-frenzy + murder-party.
Imagine his surprise when the gang stumbles in, still half-mad and covered in blood and brains.
Oops!
Oops!
So, Bunny, through a series of unfortunate puzzle pieces arraying themselves in the just-so perfect arrangement that Bunny can suss out what really happened. Bunny knows that the group murdered a man in their frenzy, a frenzy that he was none too pleased about being banned from. What does “lovable” Bunny do with this knowledge?
Torture, of course!
I can only describe the following section of TSH as glorious torture. It’s thrilling, really, to watch such a raw and realistic depiction of vindictive assholes at the mercy of an even more vindictive asshole.
To the casual observer, I suppose, he seemed pretty much his jolly old self—slapping people on the back, eating Twinkies and HoHos in the reading room of the library and dropping crumbs all down in the bindings of his Greek books. But behind that bluff façade some distinct and rather ominous changes were taking place, changes of which I was already dimly aware but which made themselves more evident as time went on.
TSH, 212
Time does march on, and one event Richard recounts sticks out in my mind when discussing the clearly abusive nature of Bunny’s outbursts,
“You don’t care about a goddamn thing, do you?” I heard Bunny scream; this was followed by a crash, as if of books being swept from desk to floor. “Not a thing but your own fucking self, you and all the rest of them—I’d like to know what Julian would think, you bastard, if I told him a couple of— Don’t touch me,” he shrieked, “get away—!”
More crashing, as if of furniture overturned, and Henry’s voice, quick and angry. Bunny’s rose above it. “Go ahead!” he shouted, so loudly I’m sure he woke the house. “Try and stop me. I’m not scared of you. You make me sick, you fag, you Nazi, you dirty lousy cheapskate Jew—”
Yet another crash, this time of splintering wood. A door slammed. There were rapid footsteps down the hall. Then the muffled noise of sobs—gasping, terrible sobs which went on for a long while.
TSH, 212-13
From the time Bunny figures out that Henry and the others committed murder to the moment he is pushed to his death, Richard the reader goes from tolerating Bunny to absolutely loathing him. Tartt has a special skill for writing truly realistic scumbags. He throws slurs out like party favors, screams, drinks, and manipulates everyone around him. He extorts Henry into taking him to Italy. On this intermission in Rome, Bunny does nothing but throw tantrums, hold Henry hostage, and generally be a terrible human being.
I know, I know, Henry murdered someone. But, from the readers vantage point the whole thing doesn’t really seem like that big of a deal. Things happen, it’s not like Henry meant to kill someone. The poor guy was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Henry wasn’t in control of himself, but Bunny, Bunny knows exactly what he’s doing here. The little shit isn’t compelled to torture Henry and the rest from a position of moral obligation, but merely because he feels left out. Bunny merely enjoys having total control over other people. The details aren’t exactly necessary, and I do still feel that anyone who’s read this far should go read the book if they haven’t already. So, I won’t spoil every terrible thing Bunny does to his victims. I will note that the whole “What-to-do-About-Bunny” section does drag a bit, especially near the end. Once the proverbial trigger of Chekov’s gun is pulled, however, the book sucks you in with the aptitude and skill of an experienced author.
Because, after a certain point, the gang just can’t fucking take it any more.
The first murder is a mulligan, let’s be real. Anyone can accidentally kill someone. To premeditate, though, requires an entirely different set of circumstances. Somehow, Richard gets pulled into all this as well. He’s on Henry’s side of course, and quietly but firmly accepts his role in killing Bunny.
And they do kill Bunny.
The whole thing happens almost from a distance. From the moment the first man is murdered and Bunny finds out about it, it’s like the little fucker has already dug his grave and thrown himself into it. It’s like watching a Rube Goldberg machine from behind plexiglass; except at the end it shoots someone in the head. The real genius of Tartt’s writing here is that even though it feels like nothing can be done to stop the murder, had anyone done anything different, Bunny would still be alive.
Richard and the others are so deftly convinced by Henry that murder is the only option. Francis tries to protest but Henry has already thought of every other possibility, and trust him, it’s the only way. Charles and Camilla go along pretty easily with the whole affair, and I feel that they don’t really consider the implications of what they’re helping to do until after it’s done. Richard even remarks from the future on several occasions that he could’ve stopped them, he could’ve saved Bunny. But he didn’t. Nobody does.
And we as the reader are left to question if that’s really so bad.
See, by the time the plot finally drags itself to the true turning point —Bunny’s long split second fall— I personally cheered. I was so sick and tired of the stress, the drawn out anxiety of whether or not Bunny would tell the world, that I was so happy to just see him go:
Wheee…
Splat!
Once the euphoria fades however, and I see in my minds eye the splayed corpse of what used to be a flawed man with his whole life ahead of him, I almost feel that the blood is on my hands, too.
Splat!
Part 3: The Second Half
Guilty Until Proven Right
So, Bunny’s dead. I’ll be honest, I was impressed. When Bunny’s death is set up in the prologue, I assumed that would be the ending. The fact that it was the halfway point ripped the rug out from under me in a really fun way. Once I finished book one I was like, what the fuck is gonna happen now? Chekov’s Gun had been fired, so the possibilities were endless. I for one was eager to know how they were gonna get themselves out of murdering another person, a student no less.
Well… Where to begin.
Henry checks to be sure he’s dead, and the then the gang leaves promptly. As they’re leaving, the first flakes of a record breaking snowstorm begin to fall. This wasn’t part of the plan, already things were starting to go off the rails. See, the plan was that Bunny’s body would be found very soon after dying, and because the easiest solution is usually the right one, the death would be assumed accidental. That was the plan, at least.
Since the body is buried under feet of snow, people start wondering where Ol’ Bun is. There’s lots of great moments with Julian asking where Bunny is, and everyone but Henry can’t handle the pressure. This actually starts to be a running theme. One of my favorite parts of the book is when Richard goes home after witnessing (and assisting in) Bunny’s death. Totally spiraling, Richard takes about five minutes to start popping pills to come with the suffocating guilt. Tartt does a great job of turning all the hate back in our faces and making us question if the murder really was as necessary as it sounded at the time. There is an unequivocal feeling of what have I done? That seeps through the text and onto the reader as everyone questions their moral boundaries.
Henry, on the other hand, is having a nice drink and trying to relax.
Psychopath is not the right word, more like born with a brain that simply functions differently from those around him. His resilience, determination, and capacity for hardship remains unmatched. Outwardly, murder doesn’t even seem to phase him, as long as he believes it was necessary. Both Richard and the reader want to hate Henry, but it’s just not possible. He is a beacon of consistency, a safe harbor from the storm. By all means, Henry is the villain. He was the one who spearheaded Bunny’s murder, and everyone else is dragged into it by his hand. The only way he is able to keep everyone from turning on him is by sheer force of personality.
The question is, how long can he keep it up?
Things Fall Apart
Let me set the stage: The FBI has been called in to investigate the disappearance of a Hampden student by the name of Bunny Corcoran. Charles has been roped into the FBI’s investigation, and he’s descending further and further into alcoholism. Francis is beginning to crack under the pressure. He begins smoking more and more, as well as continuing to hit on Richard and Charles. Camilla is getting closer and closer with Henry, and even the infallible Henry is starting to lose it.
Richard is trying his best to keep the group together, but they are all drifting in such different directions; especially after Bunny’s funeral. The FBI drops Charles as a suspect, but because of all the stress Charles gets arrested after driving Henry’s car under the influence. Henry gets Richard to bail Charles out of jail, but nobody is happy about the situation. At a certain point, everyone starts going a bit mad. Charles is drinking constantly, Camilla gets basically kidnapped by Henry, and nobody has heard from either of them for days. Francis is really the only one besides Richard who is still functioning, and former is continually chain-smoking while the latter is always popping pills to function.
Isn’t this just great? This section of the book is what happens when chasing the aesthetic is taken to it’s logical conclusion. Smoking a filterless cigarette while reading an Ancient Greek text on philosophy; drinking a hard drink, no mixer, while you brooder on dark thoughts with a darker heart. Praise for all sorts of aesthetics, dark academia, cottage-core, minimalism. All of them advocate for sacrificing as much as you’re willing to get as close to an ideal as possible. The Secret History, The Bell Jar, The Great Gatsby, all of these books push certain aesthetics as far as possible —perhaps too far— and people always end up getting hurt. Or killed. Tartt is trying to say that the pursuit of these aesthetics (or picturesque as she puts it) is futile. These aesthetics are only a façade, they don’t have the depth to fulfill a persons deepest desires.
This poignant quote from Richard sums it up pretty well,
Without warning I had a vision of Francis—twenty years later, fifty years, in a wheelchair. And of myself—older, too, sitting around with him in some smoky room, the two of us are repeating this exchange for the thousandth time. At one time I had liked that idea, that the act, at least, had bound us together; we were not ordinary friends, but friends till-death-do-us-part. This thought had been my only comfort in the aftermath of Bunny’s death. Now it made me sick, knowing there was no way out. I was stuck with them, with all of them, for good.
TSH, 459-60
The pressure is mounting for our intrepid heroes, and we are left to question if its even worth trying to make it out alive, or if that’s even possible for all of them.
No. No it’s most definitely not.
Part 4: The Wire
The End
It seems to be a pattern in this book that there is always more going on behind the scenes than Richard is privy to. Of course there’s the whole thing with the Dionysian mysteries, but then we find out that Charles and Camilla have been having incestuous sex on the regular. Charles has also been having gay sex with Francis occasionally. One of these feels significantly worse than the other), and Charles is also apparently losing his mind. See, Henry and Charles didn’t tell anyone, but the FBI was actually much closer to catching them than they let on. So close that Charles basically gives up all hope of ever being able to live a normal life again.
The FBI doesn’t end of catching them, but you can imagine how this affected poor Charles. Turning to liquor to drown his problems, he deteriorates rapidly. The reader is witness to a house fire starting in slow motion. Charles begins to hate Henry, blaming him for everything that’s happened. Richard and Francis try to mediate, but when Henry takes Camilla and locks her up in a hotel room away from everyone, Charles is inconsolable. Francis and Richard have even more problems coming their way, because Julian has found something interesting.
This particular something interesting could end up sending everyone to jail, or an early grave, who knows!
See, Julian has found a letter, drunkenly written by Bunny very close to the date of his murder. The letter details that not only did Henry, Francis, and the Twins commit murder, Bunny suspects that he’s soon to be killed, too. The letter is shrugged off, at first. When he shows it to Richard and Francis, however, Richard notices something that nobody has noticed thus far.
A letterhead, marked clearly to show that it’s from the exact place Henry and Bunny stayed while in Rome. Julian knows where Bunny and Henry stayed. Were he to see the letterhead, he would be able to easily puzzle together that the letter was written by Bunny’s doomed hand. If that happens, everyone’s fucked. Julian takes the letter back from Richard, and the two boys have no choice but to leave the office.
The clock starts now.
Richard explains, and Francis panics. The two boys collect themselves, and set out to find Henry. Through a series of shenanigans, they break into Camilla’s hotel room, only for her to tell them that Henry’s just left to see Julian.
Cue laugh track.
So, they race back to Julian’s. Once there, the situation is even more precarious than they’d feared. The two are sitting at a table, discussing the letter when Richard busts in. Henry is being cold and unhelpful, as he often does. Richard gets through to him, but when Henry stands up he flips the letter over. The letterhead is clearly visible. The moment Henry realizes what’s going on is the same moment Julian understands as well. The game is up. The cards are on the table. It’s over. Henry’s soul is viciously extracted from his body as he scrambles to explain. Julian is cold as a stone. Pitiful and scared, Henry is lost. The boys leave, and Richard remarks that this is the last time he ever saw Julian.
Σοφώτατον χρόνος· ἀνευρίσκει γὰρ πάντα.
“Time is the wisest; for it always finds out” – Pericles
Chekov’s Other Gun
So, the game is up. Julian, after reaping the seeds of evil that he himself sowed, leaves the country. Truly, a hero. What’s nice about that is he doesn’t even tell anybody. I guess the “charismatic classics professor” didn’t plan on facing the consequences of his subversive teachings. Charles is nowhere to be found, either. He’s essentially lost it, for all intents and purposes. Constantly drunk, and driven mad by his hatred for Henry, Charles has seen better days.
While he never cracked under the thumb of the FBI investigation, it opened up cracks in his psyche. Cracks that are driving him to perdition. After the incident with Julian, the distraught boys go out for lunch and discuss Charles. Henry had asked Richard and Francis to keep him under control and out of the way in the country. Once Charles realizes that it was Henry’s idea to lock him up in Francis’s summer home, he leaves. He stole a car and is currently MIA.
It is at this point that Henry starts to lose control of the situation. Not only has Charles completely turned on him, but even Francis and Richard (his two most faithful lackeys) begin to question him. It becomes clearer and clearer that Henry may not have everyone’s best interests at heart. Everyone eventually convenes in the hotel apartment where Camilla is being held. They’re all discussing what to do about Charles, and tempers are rising. The group is a far cry from the tight knit friends-till-the-end they were just a few months prior. It is in the midst of this discussion that who else shows up but the man of the hour himself!
And he’s got a gun!
Everyone is, understandably, upset. Things proceed from they very quickly. Francis throws wine into Charles’ face, Henry goes for the gun, and Richard just stands there. Menacingly. Charles fires in a random direction and the gun is wrestled away by Henry just in time for the hotel clerk to arrive asking what the hell is going on. Everything happens all at once. Henry steps away, whispering something into Camilla’s ear. Francis and Charles stare, dumbfounded. Richard sinks into a chair and bleeds profusely.
See, ol’ Richard’s been shot.
And Henry is about to join the club, too.
Richard watches through glazed, fading eyes as Henry stares out the window, almost afraid.
Bang!
Bye-bye, Henry.
Aftermath
We cut to many years later, Richard recovered and graduated. He now lives in California, the very place he was so desperate to escape in the first place. Francis spends much of his time drinking, smoking, trying to forget. Charles and Camilla don’t talk much, but supposedly Charles is very happy. Francis is unable to forget, and sends Richard a letter saying he’s going to kill himself.
Richard takes the first flight to Boston, where Francis is now in the hospital with slit wrists. Francis recovers, and he, Richard, and Camilla spend a few days together. In a half-hearted attempt, Richard tries to get Camilla to marry him, but Camilla tells him she’s still in love with Henry. She leaves. Richard thinks about a dream he had recently; he was exploring a museum with displays about different ancient civilizations. As he’s looking at a shifting display, Henry appears. He tells Richard that he’s not dead, only stuck in this place. Richard wants to ask more, but Henry’s late for an appointment.
Richard watches as Henry walks off, eventually absorbed by shadows, absorbed into oblivion.
Analysis
Ave, Maria
So, it’s safe to say that The Secret History has no heroes. It is a story of terrible people doing terrible things. The novel is an exploration of what happens when people pursue the immaterial. Aesthetic is often used today as analogous to a feeling, a genre of life, per se. That definition is a misattribution. An aesthetic in the traditional sense is something beyond that; it is the ideal, it is a lens in life through which certain aspects are magnified, and others are ignored. In short, it is impossible. To pursue that state of being, that state adjacent to divinity, is futile. Yet, that is exactly what the characters in The Secret History do; and that is their collective fatal flaw.
Richard says himself that if he believed in fatal flaws, his would be the pursuit of the picturesque. The Secret History is a cautionary tale—a tragedy, even—about what happens when people chase after aesthetic. Henry comes the closest to this aesthetic, and he pays the ultimate price for it. The friendship at the center of the book, the tightly knit Greek class, was always dysfunctional. There was always abuse, incest, and treachery. That all took place behind the curtain, away from prying eyes. What makes the book so tragically exciting is that is allows the audience to see what happens when that curtain is—forcefully—ripped away. There are issues with the plot, characters, and most of all pacing. There are several sections of the novel that seem to stretch on and on. A five-hundred and fifty-nine page word count is absurd.
Some characters feel wonderfully fleshed out, while others might as well be made of cardboard. The twins and Julian are hit the heaviest by this. Julian, despite seeming like—in my mind, at least—the real antagonist of the book, gets almost no proverbial ‘screen time’. He has a few nice speeches at the beginning of the story, but Tartt seems to forget about him for 90% of the story. He is mentioned sporadically, and doesn’t do a whole lot. This seriously disappointed me, because I believe he could have easily surpassed Henry as the best character.
Unfortunately, this is also probably due to my inflated expectations after reading the back of the book. Charles does almost nothing before the last quarter of the book, and Camilla’s character is bogged down by a paper-thin romance. Most if not all of Camilla’s scenes with Richard are soiled by his weird, out-of-character compulsion to male-gaze Camilla to death every time a sunbeam hits her at the right angle.
I haven’t even mentioned Richard.
He is at his best when he is being dramatic. His role is almost akin to the Greek chorus in a tragedy. Richard knows what’s going to happen, and thus he has a nonchalant, casual attitude. We feel the dramatic, painful moments the same way he must’ve felt them in the past. Only, due to his multifaceted nature as a character and the narrator, its hard to really get attached to him. We never hear someone else describe him, and because of his role he sort of fails to have any real agency. He is there to observe, nothing more.
The plot and the characters are always fighting for space in the book, as Tartt struggles to develop the characters without completely pausing the plot. Sometimes, she juggles the two very well, other times, not so well.
I believe the book is beautiful, regardless of it’s blemishes. It is excited, tense, and powerful. The Secret History is an easy recommendation to anyone who doesn’t mind a longer book. For those who do choose to begin the journey, know that it is worth the wait.
Or, is it?
Liar, Liar, Plants for Hire
According to Lili Anolik’s Once Upon a Time… at Bennington College, the fictional story of The Secret History may not be as fictional as it seems…
According to her podcast, the novel is a burn book. It is allegedly based on a real group of students at Bennington college who really did study Ancient Greek. Tartt tried to join the group, but was denied. Furious at her exclusion, she began dating one of the members to butt her way in. One of the students of that fateful Ancient Greek class (supposedly the one she based Bunny off of) called her “a Miss Buttisnky” and compared her to Yoko Ono, according to an article from Los Angeles Review of Books.
Many strange rumors are flung at Tartt when concerning this book, most of which are unsourced or based on hearsay, so they aren’t really worth considering seriously. There are some strangely homophobic and transphobic anecdotes from an anonymous Student X. There is a quote from Student X in an article from The New Republic about Tartt wanting to, “have sex like a young boy” and a diary entry from that same student saying Tartt was quote,
“girl who looks like a little boy, whose sexuality seems to be that she wants to be treated like a homosexual man.”
Diary of Student X
These rumors are all unsubstantiated, but there is a general sense that Tartt was not liked by all her peers at Bennington. My question is, who the hell is!?
I’m mentioning these rumors and gossip about the novel because I believe they do lead to a clearer picture of the book itself. Yes, it can be pretty safely assumed that Tartt based Hampden heavily off of Bennington, and that Julian, Henry, Bunny, and all the rest are probably based on real people as well. I guess my question is, does that really matter? Every author puts much of themselves into their work, that isn’t inherintly a bad thing. None of the people she’s allegedly basing these characters off of are named, so who cares.
So, is The Secret History really an elaborate revenge story written by Tartt to get back at the college that hated her?
Probably not, but it shouldn’t matter anyway.
Conclusion
In conclusion, Donna Tart’s The Secret History gets a:
- 3/5 for Character
- 3/5 for Setting
- 5/5 for Plot
I can definitely say I recommend this book, and it deserves the place it has in the current literary sphere.
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Sources
Works Cited
C13Originals. “Once Upon a Time… at Bennington College on Apple Podcasts.” Apple Podcasts, 8 Dec. 2021, podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/once-upon-a-time-at-bennington-college/id1521731236.
“Donna Tartt’s ‘The Secret History’ as Revenge Fantasy.” Los Angeles Review of Books, 7 Dec. 2021, lareviewofbooks.org/short-takes/donna-tartts-the-secret-history-as-revenge-fantasy/.
Livingstone, Jo, et al. “Did a Podcast About Donna Tartt Go Too Far?” The New Republic, 27 Sept. 2022, newrepublic.com/article/164092/podcast-donna-tartt-go-far-bennington-college-review.
Tartt, Donna. The Secret History. Penguin Books, 2017.
Theaetetus 176a-c; cited from Hamilton and Cairns, Collected Dialogues, 881
