The Secret History

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The Secret History

Donna Tartt

Literature

Jul 30, 2018

In the prologue, we’re shown the body, a testament to Donna Tartt’s command. Despite this revelation at the outset, her story of a coterie of classics majors from an elite New England college delivers the satisfactions of a thriller— a thriller with a literary pedigree, but a thriller nonetheless. The Secret History is an evocation of lost friendship, lost promise, lost passion, and lost youth, in which the time before the losing is brilliantly conjured. There is plenty of lost learning as well, as the worldly unworldliness of her protagonists is made dangerous by the intoxications of ancient rites and ideas. The group’s cultish devotion to a priestly professor leads them into snares that hide in plain sight, like the traps foretold in Greek tragic drama. Yet the hypnotic horror of Tartt’s tale has the seductiveness of tragedy’s stepchild, melodrama; its allure casts a narrative spell that imbues callow lives with an eerie, uneasy attractiveness.

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