Most annoying of all, though, are those tasteful details, showing many years of flipping through catalogues and magazines, that clot Tartt's prose; close little observations that bring to mind nothing so much as the face of a smug, preening tourist. There's the clock with "a little black mahout in gilt turban and breeches to strike the hours," the home with "Attic vases, Meissen porcelain, paintings by Alma-Tadema and Frith"; there's even the narrator's eye, which swells with Updikean chiaroscuro after he takes a punch, showing "the richest inks of Tyrian, chartreuse, and plum." She isn't always so blandly consumerist; sometimes she's just fatuous. A pair of cufflinks glint "in the drowsy autumn sun which poured through the window and soaked in yellow pools on the autumn floor — voluptuous, rich, intoxicating." "A November stillness was settling like a deadly oxymoron in the April landscape." A reviewer was scribbling "shitty" in the margin of his paperback.
All the way through, I kept thinking of Tracy Flick, that gratingly self-absorbed straight-A student played to perfection by Reese Witherspoon in Alexander Payne's 1999 film Election. One never quite shakes the sense of Miss Tartt sitting at her desk, hand waving in the air — I know! I know! I know! — anxious to display her freshly-learned facts, while the reader, like the teacher played by Matthew Broderick, casts his eyes about the room hoping that someone else, anyone else, will pipe up.
Thankfully, Tartt doesn't spend near so much time fanning her tail in her new novel, The Little Friend. It doesn't live up to the hype of the cheering section — it is neither "extraordinary" (Newsweek) nor "breathtaking" (Elle) — and while Tartt has pared away her excesses she has developed at least one new one, a Nabokovian tic for parenthetical summary. The book also has a weak finish that probably didn't satisfy the author anymore than it does the reader. But I'm inclined to forgive these lapses because it is a focused, interesting and often very funny book that not only drills deep into the heart of childhood but puts Tartt in what seems to be familiar territory: the red-dirt Deep South of Faulkner and O'Connor. Tartt's Mississippi town of Alexandria has crumbling mansions, trailers and pool halls, doped-up white-trash layabouts, long-suffering black folk, and a deep strain of Christian grotesquerie: Sunday School blowhards, merciless church camps, holy-roller backwoods preachers whose faces are pock-marked with rattler bites, children reenacting the Last Supper in the back yard, and, at the local church, a stained-glass window which depicts a murdered local boy sitting at the foot of Jesus.
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I'll agree there were structural problems with The Secret History. And that The Little Friend is a better book. But Tartt does deliver on her commitment: she delivers thick plot with good prose, rather than writing as if those two things are mutual antagonists.