The book is set sometime in the late 1960s to early 1970s, although it's hard to say exactly when; indeed, Tartt seems almost deliberately confusing on this point, possibly to make the book seem as if it exists in some time warp of 30 years ago. There's never any reference to a current president, which would have helped; instead, there are a lot of murky references that jostle against each other — "Dark Shadows" (which aired from 1967 to 1968) is on TV, and From Russia to Love (1968) is in the theater, but President Johnson and Martin Luther King seem to be somewhere in the past, and the "Class of 70" graffito on the local water tower is said to be fading. The past, as someone said, is another country; in this novel, it seems to be located on Planet Bizarro.
As was the case with The Secret History, a killer opening sentence pitches us into the center of the story: the death of nine-year-old Robin DuFresnes, who is suddenly missing amidst all the scurrying and planning for a Mother's Day dinner, and is soon found hanging from a tree. Twelve years later, the killer has still not been found and the death has become one of many unmentionable matters among the Dufresnes family, which includes Robin's surviving sisters Harriet, 12, and Allison, 16, their slovenly mother Charlotte, grandmother Edie, stalwart maid Ida Rhew, and a gaggle of dotty Southern aunts who live nearby. Of the lot, only Harriet, an infant when Robin died, is concerned with the lingering mystery. Robin is the hovering presence in her pre-adolescent world and — her imagination fired by Treasure Island and tales of adventure — she becomes determined to avenge him. With the help of her pal, Hely, who has not quite matured into a boyfriend, Harriet does a little detective work and figures the killer to be Danny Ratliff, son of a barbaric white trash clan. With the help of Hely and a few snakes, Harriet plots Danny's death with a child's remorseless zeal for good against evil.
Tartt is very good at mapping the worlds of these two families from either side of the tracks, and particularly the interior lives of Harriet and Danny, a young girl and a violent dope addict, both full of nerve and fear, both heading for a collision. Tartt has also developed a strong skill for the way people talk; the Ratliff crew reminded me of those sickos you meet in Elmore Leonard's thrillers, and Tartt hears them almost as well as Leonard does. She has really sharpened her wit, too; there are some hilariously dead-on portraits of Southern Baptist types, some of which were so funny I read them aloud to friends.
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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.