The Secret History by Donna Tartt

Under the influence of a charismatic classics professor, a group of clever, eccentric misfits at a New England college discover a way of thought and life a world away from their banal contemporaries. But their search for the transcendent leads them down a dangerous path, beyond human constructs of morality.

Why I Picked It Up

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This book is constantly referenced and aestheticized. It is, as the blurb and its lore claims, a "modern classic" or canonical work, spurring the growth of subgenres like dark academia. You can trace its influence—intentional or echoed—throughout titles across adult and YA, as well as across online discourse grappling with the rise or threat to intellectualism in various short-form video formats and platforms like Substack. Many people love it.

Considering my taste tends to balk at titles I view to be too harsh or bleak, I wasn't sure The Secret History would be to my taste based on what I've heard, but wanted at some point to read it and cross it off and give it a chance.

A few short ties in include a recent fascination with Bennington College (Donna Tartt's alma mater) via authors like Sally Mann and recently Caro Claire Burke.

I also just reread A Study in Charlotte by Brittany Cavallaro, an all time favorite, and she referenced The Secret History as an influence—which makes sense considering the structure of A Study in Charlotte and how Jamie and Charlotte's history is conveyed.

And at this point in the summer, I am helplessly bored and briefly stuck at my parents' house with nothing to do but work and then read when I am too tired to work, making it an A+ spot to skim through my various collected books and pick out a few that I've been "meaning to get to." Thus: The Secret History.

About the Book

First—and I do find this interesting—the book starts with the dedication to Bret Easton Ellis, who wrote American Psycho (which I utterly abhor.) So the mutual preference for characters doing cocaine and committing murder is there—a certain propensity for shock factor as depth.

The book starts with Richard, a transfer student, deciding to head off to a liberal arts college in Vermont. He studied Ancient Greek before his transfer, and Hampden soon tells him that he cannot join the single Greek class on campus. In a spell-binding, Twilight-esque way, he spies this group of five other students: Bunny, Henry, Charles, Camilla, and Francis, and simply must be a part of it, desperate for their approval and for entrance into such an exclusive little club.

“Does such a thing as 'the fatal flaw,' that showy dark crack running down the middle of a life, exist outside literature? I used to think it didn't. Now I think it does. And I think that mine is this: a morbid longing for the picturesque at all costs.”

When he's finally allowed to join, he has to withdraw from all his other classes. As the registar warns him, Julian (the intoxicatingly brilliant professor) runs his own little school within Hampden, becoming their singular tutor and ignoring mundane requirements like graduation requirements. He's essentially paying $30K/year to learn from one person.

Characters

People will refer to the characters in The Secret History as being morally complex, and this is where I'll book club rather than review, so beware blacked-out spoilers.

Characterization-wise, Richard feels like any of a handful of distant, desperate narrators who doesn't have much of a personality beyond his desperation to be included among the elite. It's not my favorite dynamic, to be honest. As a group dynamic, the students are interesting, but individually, none of them had too much that was compelling except for (in my view) Bunny and Henry being the stars here. The Secret History is called very character-driven, but I almost felt I didn't know any of them by the end much either.

The sinister way in which Bunny's character developed over time was the most compelling to me—this insidious sense of entitlement that was deeply rude. By the time Richard is talking mid-book about how he can't bring himself to view Bunny negatively because he'll recall his boyish smile or similar, I was full on the I-hate-Bunny train. Which is partly the beauty of the book—Bunny could be absolutely awful, but that doesn't give the other students the right to determine his fate. (Since they tell you at the beginning of chapter one that they murder Bunny, this isn't a spoiler.)

“The snow in the mountains was melting and Bunny had been dead for several weeks before we came to understand the gravity of our situation.”

Belonging to the classics group almost started as a challenge that Richard's ego won't let him bail on, and now they're all in too deep. Bunny's reaction to feeling on the outs—to double down on all the qualities that make him insufferable, specifically his exploitation of money—is immature and horrifying and somewhat realistic even, that he intensifies the worst traits that started his alienation in the first place. Bunny creates the dynamic with his willingness to exploit the others, but their hidden secret (the murder during their Bacchian reveling) makes them increasingly desperate, but Richard goes along with it because he considers these people his friends when they really aren't all that close.

They have a shared familiarity and the intimacy of attending the same classes, but there's not warmth between them so much as competition and a desperation to be in-group. It starts out as a natural, evolutionary instinct, but then turns into a pointless cling to misery.

“'You don't feel a great deal of emotions for other people, do you?' I was taken aback. 'What are you talking about?' I said. 'Of course I do.' 'Do you?' He raised an eyebrow. 'I don't think so. It doesn't matter,' he said, after a long, tense pause. 'I don't, either.'”

Levels of maturity vary, but most teenagers and young adults reading this will resonate with the strangeness of being hungry to be anointed even when you can intellectually understand that being a part of the group is not actually that great. These people are not that nice, and they are not all that good to each other, and they are constantly in fact resentful of each other, and their outings are somewhat not all that fun either. The magnetism was well-spun, but I would have loved a little more grip to any of them.

I will say, I was also expecting slightly more from Julian!

A small, picky detail too: I absolutely loathe the twin storyline for many reasons.

One of my favorite, most telling details details: Charles being frustrated that Henry spends more time figuring out which book will look most impressive to be holding when going in for police interrogation instead of actually worrying about being questioned about a mysterious death.

Tone & Voice

Written in the 80s and published in the 90s, The Secret History is almost eerily old-fashioned in its aesthetics, which, again, is partly why it captivates this specific dark academia aesthetic—boozy ol' boys lunches, etc.

“There was a grand piano, too, and Charles was playing, a glass of whiskey on the seat beside him. He was a little drunk; the Chopin was slurred and fluid, the notes melting sleepily into one another. A breeze stirred the heavy, moth-eaten velvet curtains, ruffling his hair.”

There's a stiffness to the narrative that makes it deemed literary, and I even think buildups like "My name is" at the beginning—a rule few other authors are able to use—contribute to the signaling that The Secret History is an intellectual book. I thought about how Jennifer Lynn Barnes constructs her books using gossip theory and the human evolutionary instinct to be "in on things," and that's very much part of the book.

The book is at times unbearably pretentious, which is part of its appeal both thematically and as an identity-signaling kind of read on the Internet. It's also intentionally so, because it comments on the need for pretension in an often self-aware way. People love the Classics references á la Babel or Boys with Sharp Teeth, and the effect is that the narrative feels rather rather lost in time.

I can appreciate its construction on the elegant, sinister level of it being somewhat disturbing the whole way through, which did make me realize that I don't actually enjoy the reading experience even though I appreciated the autumnal atmosphere, the subtle push of the morals bumping against the book's questions, etc. It's a lot to sustain over six hundred pages.

Richard's refusal to ask for help and insistence on maintaining appearances to the extent he almost froze to death that winter were truly horrifying to me, and the effectiveness of that lonely academic imagery actually put me in enough of a funk that it was hard for me to sleep that night. Tartt writes about that winter staying in his bones and haunting him, and it's a bundle of imagery and isolation that lingers.

It almost reminds me of this quality from Murakami's Norwegian Wood: the belief that they're meant to be unhappy, and thus double down on the imagery surrounding that separation from others—except in this case, it stems from them viewing others as lesser and less intellectual. Congratulations on being special; now here is your prize.

“It is a terrible thing to learn as a child that one is a being separate from the world, that no one and no thing hurts along with one’s burned tongues and skinned knees, that one’s aches and pains are all one’s own. Even more terrible, as we grow older, to learn that no person, no matter how beloved, can ever truly understand us. Our own selves make us most unhappy, and that’s why we’re so anxious to lose them, don’t you think?”

“And how did they drive people mad? They turned up the volume of the inner monologue, magnified qualities already present to great excess, made people so much themselves that they couldn’t stand it.”

Regardless of my personal taste, I understand how the book has been so captivating to many and can appreciate many elements of its construction; it's very specifically moody. I did also love this section about studying ancient Greek, which really made me feel the love for it:

“Pur: that one word contains for me the secret, the bright, terrible clarity of ancient Greek. How can I make you see it, this strange harsh light which pervades Homer’s landscapes and illumines the dialogues of Plato, an alien light, inarticulable in our common tongue? Our shared language is a language of the intricate, the peculiar, the home of pumpkins and ragamuffins and bodkins and beer, the tongue of Ahab and Falstaff and Mrs Gamp; and while I find it entirely suitable for reflections such as these, it fails me utterly when I attempt to describe in it what I love about Greek, that language innocent of all quirks and cranks; a language obsessed with action, and with the joy of seeing action multiply from action, action marching relentlessly ahead and with yet more actions filing in from either side fall into neat step at the rear, in a long straight rank of cause and effect toward what will be inevitable, the only possible end.”

Pacing & Plot

I do think it could have been much shorter, and that my interest majorly fell off in the second half. At that point, the spiraling and anxiety surrounding the murder and its coverup got repetitive, and it took a lot of effort for me to continue reading. I can't say my reading of the back half was as careful or invested, and a good bit felt more self-indulgent than the beginning. I might be too old here in that I don't think the characters are so much tortured and morally gray as they are immature and short-sighted. (I don't need my characters to be moral or even smart, but I think it's important to point out considering how the book is hailed as oh-so-deep.)

Granted, they're college students still, but there's not enough motivation for them at any point—no light at the end of the tunnel. With the plot stretching the way it did, I would have liked to feel more connected to the characters because I still left the book feeling like I didn't get to know anyone other than Bunny.

It sounds strange to say "outside of the murder," but The Secret History does somewhat falter on how casual or intense it chooses to treat the choice to kill someone, which can be disorienting. Perhaps more intentional than I read it to be? I think in some ways, Tartt may not have been decisive enough in her plot, which contributes to the sense the back half drags or is plodding.

I did want more cultishness or more targeted darkness versus the more diffuse devolution depicted. The themes are interesting, but I almost wanted more from them, and think if the book had been cut down more than it would have felt more distilled in that realm. But—different time, different standards, so I can recognize how that's a subjective personal preference.

Overall Thoughts

The Secret History is haunting and well-curated and occasionally insufferable and a little long, but I respect its impact and found the insularity and social dependence depicted within it to be deeply interesting. The morals, and sense of entitlement, can be dark, and I see why it attracts aestheticization—especially because Richard himself admits this attraction to beauty. There were also some very pretty lines.

“Maybe that's why I tend to equate physical beauty with qualities with which it has absolutely nothing to do.”

I do think it was great, but not flawless, and takes on a veneer beyond itself because of its role as an identity signifier for capital-r Readers. What belonging to the group says about you is what makes its existence intoxicating—the theme of the book, and much of the basis for its appeal. I did think it would be and get deeper. I could see why it endures, and understand why its specificity makes it a core text across certain genres.

In fairness, I may be more like the "lowbrow, pop-psychology version of Sylvia Plath" towards whom Richard was condescending. I believe too much in neuroplasticity to have much patience for this particular strain of melancholia and self-indulgence sustained for so long. (Upon encountering the "male philosopher king" archetype laid out in this book, that tracks; usually, my impression is that they may benefit from therapy.)

For fans of:

Ninth House by Leigh Bardugo, Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami, Babel by R.F. Kuang, Boys with Sharp Teeth by Jenni Howell, Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke, American Philosophy by John Kaag, The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald, American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis