City News

In Hampton College, Vermont, aspiring young man, Richard Papen, is granted entrance to the ranks of six figures shrouded in mystery: the five students studying Greek, and their eccentric teacher.  Richard’s sanity, and loyalty to his friends, is tested again and again.  After all, how far would you go to help a friend kill a friend?

The Secret History is an inverted, psychological, detective novel by Donna Tartt.  It is told in a unique style, which is a man reminiscing on some significant events that took place in his college life a bit over a year ago.  So, we follow a group of clever, eccentric misfits at Hampton, a New England college.  These students, Richard Papen (who narrates), Henry Winter, Francis Abernathy, Camilla and Charles Macaulay, and Edmund “Bunny” Corcoran, live and think in a way beyond their contemporaries.  The situation takes a turn for the worse, when they go beyond the boundaries of morality, and slip into the realm of evil.

The novel can not truly be classified as a “whodunnit”, as the murder and the murderers are exposed in the Prologue itself.  The book is a justification for the cold blooded murder executed on the pretext that it was the only escape the characters have, when actually it opens the doors to a new set of problems that are even more horrific.  Tartt manages to get into the reader’s psyche and expose one’s innermost and darkest human impulses, whether one agrees to it or not!

This book contains content that may not be suitable for younger audiences, such as smoking, hate speech, alcoholism, abuse, and murder.  Although this may be true, I highly recommend it to mature readers.  It is the thinking person’s thriller.  The group’s horrific crime leads to their inexorable decline, making this a modern-day Greek tragedy, full of sorrow and struggle, but accompanied by pure loyalty and divine inspiration.  The flow of the story is mesmerizing, causing the book to be practically impossible to put down.  Tartt’s writing is verklempt, suspenseful, and thrilling, but not in the standard way.  Because the reader is told in the very first line about the grave event that happens, it is not a question of figuring out who did it, but why.  All the characters are morally grey to just generally horrible people, but the reader completely ignores it because Donna Tartt weaves this hypnotic spell with her writing, that fully immerses one in the story, and makes one feel like one is reading this book in a dream-like lull. The characters in this book are bad people, but for some inexplicable reason they are so sympathetic, so relatable, that many readers feel a longing to live their life.  The Secret History is unlike anything I’ve ever read before, and I’m not sure I’ll ever read anything quite like it again.

Tartt writes, “Beauty is terror.  Whatever we call beauty, we quiver before it.”  This book is beautiful.

Check out Secret History from the Newport Beach Public Library.