The New Canon: The Secret History by Donna Tartt - Page 2

There is much to admire in Tartt’s novel, but it is especially laudable for how persuasively she chronicles the steps from studying classics to committing murder. This is a difficult transition to relate in a believable manner, and all the more difficult given Tartt’s decision to tell the story from the perspective of one of the most genial of the conspirators. Her story could easily come across as implausible — or even risible — in its recreation of Dionysian rites on a Vermont college campus, and its attempt to convince us that a mild-mannered transfer student with a taste for ancient languages can evolve, through a series of almost random events, into a killer. Yet convince us she does, and the intimacy with which Tartt brings her readers into the psychological miasma of the unfolding plot is one of the most compelling features of The Secret History.

A telltale scene, reveling this author’s mastery, comes early in the novel. Richard Papen, our narrator, has just been allowed to join the small clique of students who take almost all of their classes from the charmingly eccentric classics professor Julian Morrow. At his first class, Morrow delivers an eloquent, but ominous, talk about the ancient Greeks’ comfort with the irrational - which the professor contrasts with the Roman’s obsession with order and attendant attempt to eliminate, or ignore, the dark side of human dealings. This interlude evokes in brilliant strokes Morrow’s charisma, his erudition, and the hothouse atmosphere of his classroom. Yet the philosophical values that the professor sets out here foreshadow many of the later incidents in this smartly plotted book. This is Tartt at her best, deliciously blending the abstract and concrete, the theoretical and the practical, the present charged with the historical past and all the fatalistic aspects of the unfolding future.

Even though the novel is set in Vermont, with a few scenes overseas or on the West Coast, the Mississippi-born Tartt somehow brings to bear a Southern Gothic atmosphere to her story. The setting, Hampden College, resembles Bennington, where Tartt transferred in 1982, after first gaining some notoriety for her work under the direction of Barry Hannah at Ole Miss, and the plot parallels to some degree the unsolved case of a missing Bennington student from the 1940s. Yet Tartt’s fascination with the paradoxical ways violence can coexist with refinement and delicacy is reminiscent of Eudora Welty, Flannery O’Connor, and those other Southern ladies who mix an extra dose of Id in their Superego.

Article Author: Ted Gioia

Ted Gioia is a writer and musician. He is the author of Delta Blues, The History of Jazz and, most recently, The Birth (and Death) of the Cool.

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