Book Review: The Secret History
I think I've rewritten this review four times now, because I kept changing my mind the deeper into the book I read. That'll teach me for trying to be efficient.
For my second book, I rolled up Donna Tartt's The Secret History, which gave me tonal whiplash after the last book. It's 559 pages, it claims to be a mystery thriller, and it's about a (totally oblivious) Californian boy attending a college in New England who gets involved with a bunch of rich kids in an exclusive Greek/Classics track. But it's not just that. It's a bunch of rich kids who are so head-first in the sands of the Greek philosophers and poetics, that they, especially the ringleader Henry, basically abandon any semblance of good morals, to disastrous effect. This how my reading of the book went:
- 0-25%: This is pretty good, I'm enjoying this.
- 25-50%: This is dragging on forever. 3 stars max
- 50-75%: Things have finally gotten good, this is suspenseful. 3.5 stars
- 75-85%: Oh. OH. OH NO. I think I hate these rich kids even more, and I didn't know that was possible. 4 stars, and I really want to do a deep dive analysis someday.
- 85-95%: Things are getting intense, I can't put this down.
- 95-100%: Uh, what? That was a let down. 3.5 stars, final offer.
Essentially, this is two books in my mind, hinging, literally and metaphorically, on one event situated right at the midpoint. The first half of the novel is glacially paced, the tension simmers too low to even heat water, and Richard, the narrator, waxes poetic about these rich kids he's entangled with far too often without moving the plot along. It's less a mystery or a thriller and more ruminations on each character over and over again, as if Richard is trying really hard to justify the action that happens at the midpoint. The first half literally covers the start of the school year through to April, but almost nothing plot actually happens. But then in the second half, the pacing really picks up, and this is the part where the thriller label is accurate. After the action of the midpoint, it's the suspense of "will they get away with it", "will this event break the friend group completely"1, and the closer to the ending it gets, the faster-paced it is.
One major criticism I have is that because Richard is the outsider of the group and completely oblivious to that the rich kids are doing during the first 30-40% of the book, he doesn't actively witness a lot of the story, and we are only told things by other characters (as told to Richard). Even after the midpoint, a lot of the plot stuff happens to other characters and Richard only learns of it after-the-fact. So it's a lot of dialogue and editorializing, rather than action in-scene. But, at the same time, I can't see how it could be any other way, just by nature of how the story plays out.
This book really should have been 300 pages shorter. It was so long, that by the time the ending came around, I had completely forgotten what the beginning was, conflating it with another Dark Academia upmarket book I read back in 2017 (If We Were Villains, by M.L. Rio), which was shorter and had a frame story. It was this conflation that set me up for an unsatisfactory ending. But if the story had been shorter, I wouldn't have forgotten how things had begun, and I wouldn't have been disappointed by the ending.
In the end, I have to give the book 3.5 stars. It had its good moments, the prose was beautiful at times, and it was interesting trying to analyze the structure and the unreliable narrator and the way the story played out. But there was too much "filler", and the ending did not go where I thought it would, in a not great way. I will probably keep it as a trophy book, but it won't go on my favorites shelf, that's for sure.
The answer to both, is yes.↩