May 29th, 2023

The Secret History

I read The Secret History in a panic because I want to join a new book club and it’s the first book and hard to get ahold of, and I could only get a 7-day loan from the library. But as it turned out, it’s the sort of book that it makes sense to scream through, all 524 pages of it–it’s just a blast. It’s from 1992 and apparently everyone’s read it but me, but just in case: it’s about a kid from California named Richard Papen who transfers in to a private Vermont college at the beginning of his third year. He likes studying ancient Greek, but it turns out the only way to take it at this college is in a tiny elite class with an eccentric, independently wealthy professor named Julian who doesn’t even draw a salary from the school and who handpicks all his students. It’s a struggle, but Richard gets into the class, Julian makes him drop almost every other class and study mainly with him and these five other kids. You NEVER find out why Julian insists on this, what the point of being so isolated and weird is, how the other students were chosen for the class (they are varying degrees of good at/interested in Greek) or why they couldn’t just have a normal collegiate experience–or why Julian wants to teach at this college for no money and spend all his time with this tiny group of students for every class. I thought this set of oddnesses was going to be the central mystery of the book but none of it never gets explained and this is very annoying. That whole spiel above just a very complicated background setup for the rest of the book.

Richard is poor, erudite, pretentious, and desperate to fit in. The other students in his class are mainly wealthy, even more erudite, pretentious, and after a pause, willing to accept him, more or less. They have a very brief halcyon period of hanging around campus and someone’s country house, where they do things like go out in a rowboat and play cards and croquet, and drink champagne out of a teapot. This was around the time I began to wonder when the book is set–the Greek class wears suits and ties (dresses for the lone girl) to school, takes baths every day (you wouldn’t think this would come up, but it does), and are forever drinking hard liquor and mixed drinks and champagne even though they are university students. The intersections between the Greek class, which seems to live in the Edwardian period, and the rest of the school, which you eventually discover is living the 1980s, are brief and rare (and very funny) in the early chapters–someone accidentally wanders into a slam dance and reacts violently, someone wearing jean shorts tries to invite someone wearing a suit to a party. In later chapters, when things are falling apart, the present day creeps into the ancient world a lot more, and you hear mention of cd cases, Twinkies, rap music, beer cans. At one point, worried about how a criminal act is being seen in the media, one member of the Greek class asks another, “How much do you think a TV costs?” (they wind up stealing one) I thought it might have been an effort to convey how hard the characters were working to keep up their illusions and how they started, slowly and then not so slowly, to crumble. I actually do not know what it was, but I don’t entirely care–I LOVED the weird temporal/atemporal stuff, even if I did not completely get it or know what there was to be gotten.

This is such a weird book in that sometimes I thought Donna Tartt was not trying very hard to keep certain balls in the air, but she’s such a good writer that it’s fun to bounce along even when balls hit the ground from time to time–that sense of period was one, and the setting was another. No one has ever conveyed the gorgeousness and intense seclusion of an exclusive Vermont college better than Richard Papen’s voice in this book–and I’m not sure anyone has ever ridiculed California more intensely. Oh wow, poor Plano–but also, how brilliantly does Tartt/Papen bring the chainlink fences and gas stations to naked exposure. As I recall, there’s a few other things out in Cali, but not in this rendering, and I believed it. Richard Papen is a convincing perspective.

Onto the crimes–THAT’S the central mystery of the novel–Julian all but disappears early on, they do continue to study Greek but more as an aesthetic rather than academic pursuit, and the whole novel becomes about a string of bizarre crimes, their coverup, and the related undoing of the characters over them.

The first one–a fairly random murder of an unknown character–takes place off-stage and for reasons that don’t make sense to me and never really gets explained. The second is centrepiece of the book and has a huge buildup and fallout and is, in its way, truly devastating. It is a testimony to Donna Tartt’s brilliance as as a writer that when I was in the book I rarely thought “There is no reason for sane people to behave like this,” but later I would be mulling it over, or trying to describe it why I liked the book so much to Mark, and couldn’t string it together. You cannot start from the middle here–Tartt draws you in, and makes the reader morally complicit in a string of horrifying acts.–it’s truly bananas, in the end, and that’s fine as long as you’re completely engrossed. You sink deeper and deeper into the morass, and as the characters become brainwashed that they “must” do the inexcusable, the reader wavers on the verge of believing it too. What choice do they have, really? Or do they? Or what? That’s good writing… A lot of the last third is the characters of course being consumed by guilt, drinking and agonizing and doing drugs and fighting, but the whole time I was sort of hoping it would work out for them. The heinous

There’s a BIG fan base for this novel on the internet–while I was being jazzed at how much I loved it (I feel like the above does not sound very positive, but in my way I truly did) I read a lot of it. A lot of folks complain about the lack of a movie or TV adaptation, but to my mind, there IS one–the Shonda Rhimes How to Get Away with a Murder that ran from 2014 to 2020 and starred Viola Davis as the charismatic (and much more present) professor. In that show, the study group was for law, not Greek, which was a bit more on the nose if you’re dealing with the students committing crimes. As well, the clever temporal/atemporal tricks that Tartt performs were absent, as were most of the details about setting. There’s also no lens character, since it is TV, and the perspective flits around amongst the group, although…with seasons to play out it’s a long game but I did sense who the more doomed characters were early on. Yes, I watched a lot of that show too, years before I read the novel, and loved it too in its very different way. Less artful and more soapy than the novel, but more contemporary and less hidebound (the queer character has more to do than just be sad and closeted–he is the most interesting, probably, other than the prof)–both have their charms. I tried my “How to Get Away with Murder is a ripoff of The Secret History” theory on a friend who had read/watched both, and she said, “it’s not a ripoff, it’s a genre,” with other books, tv, and films about groups of young people who fell under the spells of charismatic leaders and then did terrible things. I’m curious about that, not sure, but it is odd that no one else on the whole internet has connected TSH with HtGAWM so…

The book club meets tomorrow and I wanted to get this written so that I would have a record of what I thought before I heard too many more opinions–I am pretty impressionable these days. But this book is amazing and the sort thing you can completely lose yourself in and I recommend it highly!