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Donna Tartt’s debut novel, The Secret History, which has been out for almost three decades now, is still the standard-bearer for that niche genre of stylish New England academic novels. The novel’s haunting narrator, Richard Papen, a scholarship student from California who becomes involved with a small group of eccentric classics students at a prestigious Vermont university, has been bewitching readers since 1992. The prologue starts with the lines, “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. He’d been dead for ten days before they found him, you know.” And so begins a timeless tale of murder and intrigue in 1980’s Vermont.
The Secret History is not exactly a murder mystery, the prologue reveals who was murdered, how they were murdered, and who did it. It is more of a why-dunnit, gradually unfolding the events that led to the murder of Bunny Corcoran, a member of the small clique of Greek scholars at Hampden College whom Richard becomes associated with. First, there is Henry Winter, an outrageously wealthy and hard-to-read intellectual, the one who most resembles a ringleader of the group. Then there are the twins, Charles and Camilla MacCauley, mysterious orphans who strikingly resemble blonde Greek statue figures. Next, there is Francis Abernathy, a wealthy aesthete; and finally, Bunny Corcoran, an All-american prep school veteran who frequently eats on the lunch tickets of his wealthier friends. Richard quickly becomes enchanted by the group, an insular unit who take all of their courses together—taught by the fascinating and benevolent Julian Morrow. Julian is a controversial figure in the Literature department at Hampden, he rarely accepts students into his classics courses, and if he does accept them, they can only be taught by him and no other instructor.
Richard convinces Julian to allow him to take his full course load in classics, where he becomes a part of this previously inscrutable classics clique. They meet exclusively in Julian’s office for class, which always begins with the question, “I hope we’re all ready to leave the phenomenal world, and enter into the sublime?” Richard is at once terrified and enthralled by his new classmates and their curious behavior, and it soon becomes obvious that something nefarious is brewing under the surface. Richard’s classmates reveal almost nothing about their personal lives, and as it turns out, there are a great deal of sexual and social issues plaguing the group. The murder plot is gradually revealed, as it becomes clear that the group was tiring of Bunny, who was less intelligent and less serious about his studies than his classmates. He also used them for their material wealth—particularly Henry, who pays for virtually everything Bunny eats, drinks, or owns. The final straw comes when Bunny finds out the truth about the other four students—that they had attempted a Greek bacchanalia that ended in murder. Bunny threatens to come forward with the murder, lording this over his classmates until they felt that they had no other option but to eliminate him.
Richard writes in the prologue about the massive hunt for Bunny’s body after the murder, “It is difficult to believe that such an uproar took place over an act for which I was partially responsible, even more difficult to believe I could have walked through it—the cameras, the uniforms, the black crowds sprinkled over Mount Cataract like ants in a sugar bowl—without incurring a blink of suspicion.” The students have a curious moral distance from their actions—they consume copious amounts of drugs and alcohol to deal with the aftermath of their actions, but less out of guilt than fear of being caught. The students, including Richard, are so consumed by their self-obsessive tendencies that they never really come to terms with their own involvement in ruining and ending lives.
The second half of the book, following Bunny’s murder, devolves into destructive chaos, as each student’s shiny veneer becomes tarnished by their group turmoil. The fallout is devastating, and even Richard—the Nick Carraway everyman of the narrative—begins losing his grasp of reality. Tartt’s novel is so devastating because of the complicated moral politics, as the students lose themselves in pursuit of some classical idealized concept of beauty that they lose their human elements. Tartt lures the reader into the narrative so expertly, mirroring Richard’s obsessive journey into this insular New England collegiate drama. Richard states at the beginning, “I suppose at one time in my life I might have had any number of stories, but now there is no other. This is the only story I will ever be able to tell.” Luckily for us, Tartt has more stories to tell.
Further Reading: My review of Donna Tartt’s other bestselling novel, The Goldfinch.