The New Republic

The Little Friend

by Donna Tartt

(Alfred A. Knopf, 555 pp., $26)

Click here to purchase the book."Ladies and gentlemen," announces Harry Houdini in an epigraph to
Donna Tartt's new novel, "I am now locked up in a handcuff that has
taken a British mechanic five years to make. I do not know whether
I am going to get out of it or not, but I can assure you that I am
going to do my best." Houdini's ghost hovers faintly over The
Little Friend, but the handcuff to which Tartt is referring seems
to have more to do with her last novel than her current one. For
with The Secret History, her enormously popular debut in 1992, Tartt
set herself a trap as elaborately and painstakingly worked as
Houdini's handcuff, and one from which escape has proved
exceedingly difficult.

All first novels are traps of a sort, but if Tartt's cage was
unusually gilded--The Secret History sold more than a million
copies and established the writer, still in her twenties, as a
publishing legend--it was also unusually constricting. Though
critics celebrated Tartt's technical brilliance, they generally
treated the book as a thriller, if an unusually well-written one,
with all the condescension thus implied. The plot makes it easy to
see why: a tightly knit group of eccentric college students,
inspired by the Greeks, conduct a bacchanal during which (true to
their source) they accidentally kill a local farmer. When their
friend Bunny finds out about the murder, he blackmails them, and
they decide the only way out is to kill him as well.

Yet The Secret History is not a murder mystery, not least because
the murders are over before the book is halfway through. All the
melodrama makes it easy to overlook how smart a book it is, from
Tartt's inspired choice of a narrator (the book is told in a
flashback by Richard, a latecomer to the classics group who is
somewhat of an outsider to the events) to her sophistication about
her own methods. The novel begins with an epigraph from
Plato--"Come then, and let us pass a leisure hour in storytelling,
and our story shall be the education of our heroes"--and Richard
picks up on the storytelling motif in the novel's prologue. "This
was a tale that told itself simply and well," he says of Bunny's
death: "the loose rocks, the body at the bottom of the ravine with
a clean break in the neck ... a hiking accident, no more, no less."
But this "tale," of course, is false, since Bunny's death was no
accident. And The Secret History, despite its deceptively
straightforward beginning--"This is the only story I will ever be
able to tell," Richard somberly concludes--is not told simply at
all. It is a multiplicity of stories: Richard's journey as a
scholarship student to the elite Hampden College, the complex
dynamics of the group of friends, and the characters' psychic
disintegration in the aftermath of the murder, which unrolls over
the course of the entire second half of the 500-plus-page novel.

Stylistically, The Secret History is nearly perfect, from its
deliberately edgy pacing to its beautifully realized dialogue. But
what is most seductive about the book is its extraordinary sense of
atmosphere. Richard begins the novel with a little speech about the
"fatal flaw," and notes that his own is "a morbid longing for the
picturesque at all costs." This is a fine description of the aura
of decadence that suffuses the novel's world. Tartt's style can
bring to mind the early Ian McEwan, but her affinity for the
grotesque has deeper roots. Richard comments at one point that the
"breath of the ancient world" can be sensed around the group of
friends, and one also gets a dank whiff of the gothic. Like her
eighteenth- and nineteenth-century predecessors, Tartt delights in
the sheer artificiality of fiction, mixing the real and the unreal,
the recognizable and the unfamiliar, into a waking-dream collage.
And, like her forebears, she darkens the mood now and then with
touches of the supernatural, some left tantalizingly unexplained.

The characters who thrive in this hothouse could be refugees from
Dickens or Bront. Henry is the group's leader, an
independent-minded if unfocused genius who published a translation
of Anacreon ("with commentary") when he was eighteen, and at one
point is described translating Paradise Lost into Latin as a way to
kill time, "like some people do crossword puzzles." Francis, his
sidekick, is a flamboyant, petulant trust-fund baby whose family
owns a crumbling country house to which the group often retreats.
Charles and Camilla, orphaned twins, have faces like a pair of
"Flemish angels." All are deliberately anachronistic, in their
clothing (Henry always wears a "dark English suit" and carries an
umbrella, and it is one of Tartt's most fantastic touches that not
one of these college students seems to own a pair of jeans) and in
their affectations, which include using straight pens and bottled
ink to write their Greek homework.

Reading the book as an adult, it is easy to see Henry for the cold
pedant that he is, and Francis as a spoiled hypochondriac, and
Camilla as manipulative, and Richard, in the end, as a cipher. But
to read it in college is to be swept away by the childish fantasy
of it all--the beautiful clothes and the rich friends and the
dreamy indulgence. Hampden College is awash in pharmaceuticals, but
the novel's real drug is the opiate of nostalgia. Richard, narrating
the events at a distance of ten years, is still too in love with
the friends to look at them with an even faintly critical eye.

And as irresistible as The Secret History is, it too finally asks to
be adored rather than examined. Some critics have located the
book's own fatal flaw in a lack of a moral center, and it is true
that the characters admit of no emotion regarding the murders other
than the fear of being caught. But by the end their mental
unraveling is complete. Whether it was Bunny's murder itself or the
effort to cover it up that undoes them, the friends descend into a
psychological chaos reminiscent of Dostoyevsky. And it is here that
Tartt's gothic sensibility finally runs wild. The fraternal
closeness of Charles and Camilla explodes in alcoholic violence.
Richard is plagued by nightmares in which Bunny's murdered corpse
appears in his dorm room. And Henry's shadowy malevolence starts to
make one wonder whether he might be the devil himself.

Though these sinister elements contribute a great deal to the book's
power, eventually they undermine its moral gravity. It is hard to
shake the sense that Tartt does not take her own book entirely
seriously. And this, I think, is because the gothic, no matter how
carefully it is handled, always runs the risk of crossing over into
camp. Tartt for the most part gets it right: the supernatural
elements are not events in themselves, but symbols of the real
psychological terrors beneath. Still, the "morbid longing for the
picturesque at all costs" is in the end a fundamentally unserious
notion. The students are fond of evoking the maxim that "beauty is
terror." But terror itself has an unnerving tendency to dissolve
into laughter.

The romance of death has deep roots for Tartt. In a brief memoir
that appeared in Harper's just before the publication of The Secret
History, she described her "Southern gothic childhood" in vivid
detail. Born to parents who were "neither able nor inclined" to
deal with an infant, she was raised by her great-aunts and
grandparents, and a great-grandfather who treated her frequent
ailments with glasses of whiskey and "massive doses" of codeine
cough syrup. "Between the fever and the whiskey and the codeine,"
she writes, "I spent nearly two years of my childhood submerged in
a pretty powerfully altered state of consciousness." Her
great-grandfather believed that her sickliness was a sign that she
would soon be "gathered swiftly to the Lord"; on one bad night, she
overheard him say to her mother, "I'm afraid that poor child won't
live to see the morning."

It is no surprise that Tartt, too, was possessed by the idea that
she would meet an early grave. Delirious with fever and drugs, she
suffered terrible nightmares:

The very worst dream of all still frightens me to think of, even
though it is years since I last dreamed it. In it, a set of
country-club types--smartly dressed, around what would have then
been my parents' age--are gathered, cocktails in hand, around a
barbecue grill. They are snickering with jaded amusement as one of
their number--a handsome, caddish-looking fellow--holds a howling
Persian cat over the barbecue, pushing its feet into the flames....
Though it was never quite clear exactly who these people were, it
was obvious to me that what they were doing was Devil worship ...
and that what I had glimpsed were only the more innocent,
preliminary stages of the ritual. Unimaginable horrors lay beyond.
Which set me thinking, as I lay back trembling in bed after Mother
had come and gone, about Devils, and Hell, and all the bad things
there were in the world, and what was really going to happen to me
after I died, and I would start to scream again....

The demon of this nightmare--all the bad things there are in the
world, and what really happens after we die--has pursued Tartt well
into adulthood, and it forms the link between The Secret History
and The Little Friend. Though both novels are centered around the
murder of a young person, they truly find their focus in the
multiplying acts of violence that shoot out like angry tendrils
from the original crime. The Little Friend finds Tartt more enmeshed
in the macabre than ever, though it has now taken on the more
realistic (if no less gruesome) characteristics of the style
familiar as Southern gothic. Rather than enhancing the novel's
psychological impact, though, this fixation--there is a corpse,
human or animal, in every chapter--threatens to choke it.

The prologue of The Little Friend describes the murder of
nine-year-old Robin Cleve Dufresnes; or rather, it describes the
circumstances surrounding Robin's murder, because the crime itself
is witnessed only by his two sisters, the infant Harriet and the
four-year-old Allison, who has repressed whatever she saw to such
an extent that it appears in her dreams only as a white sheet. When
the novel proper begins, twelve years later, that terrible day has
hardly faded; as in The Secret History, the impact of a person on
those close to him is far greater in death than it was in life. And
again Tartt is obsessed with crimes that go unpunished: Robin's
killing reverberates in the various acts of depravity that ripple
throughout the book, from emotional betrayal to, finally, another
murder.

Harriet and her sister have been raised largely by their grandmother
Edie, a bevy of adoring great-aunts, and the family's longtime
housekeeper, Ida Rhew. (Robin's death sent the girls' mother into a
dreamy depression from which she has never awakened, and their
father lives with a mistress in Nashville, returning home only at
Christmas.) Harriet, who looks like a "small badger," is the sort
of child who likes to read about Genghis Khan and Captain Scott and
to stir up fights among her great-aunts by telling them what they
really think of each other's Christmas gifts. But she, too, has
grown up obsessed with her brother's death, which she blames for
the disintegration of her family. Left to her own devices for the
summer, she resolves to track down and punish Robin's killer, whom
she decides, based on the most circumstantial indications, must be
Danny Ratliff, a former classmate of Robin's who has sunk into a
life of petty crime. As Harriet trails Danny around town (there are
shades of Harriet the Spy here), waiting for the right moment to
strike, he becomes equally obsessed with her, convinced that she is
out to get him for an entirely different reason.

The plot machinations that lead Harriet into her detective work are
creaky, and in general the thriller's backbone fits The Little
Friend even more poorly than it did The Secret History. At its best
moments, this novel is something like an epic of two families in
the South, with overtones of forebears from Margaret Mitchell to
Anne Rice. The Cleves are descended from the town's elites, and
once lived in a plantation ponderously named Tribulation. Like the
great- aunts who remember it, the house is now crumbling, but they
have carefully preserved its chandeliers and china, which appear to
Harriet like "dinosaur bones" that, if examined carefully enough,
will reveal the shape of the family's past.

Like Harriet and her sister, the Ratliff brothers have been reared
by their grandmother, but that is where the resemblance ends.
Danny's older brother Farish is simultaneously terrifying and
comical: he will wear only brown UPS coveralls, which he buys by
the dozen, perhaps because this outfit reminds him of his old days
as a letter carrier--a job that fit well with his sideline in
burglary, as it kept him apprised of the neighbors' vacation
schedules. "The bushy black beard and the brown jumpsuit made him
look like some kind of crazy South American dictator," Harriet's
friend Hely remarks. Now, recently out of prison, he runs a dual
taxidermy and methamphetamine business from a shed behind the
family's trailer. (The stink of the taxidermy chemicals
conveniently masks the "distinctive cat-piss smell" of the meth
cooking.) Another brother, Eugene, has become a roadside preacher
after an injury suffered in prison left him born again, but his new
devotion to God doesn't prevent him from turning a blind eye to his
brothers' business. Danny, despite his hoodlum exterior, turns out
to be the most three-dimensional of the brothers: he longs to get a
job as a truck driver and escape Farish's cycle of addiction and
crime.

Tartt has lost none of the considerable gifts she displayed in her
first novel; she is one of the most mesmerizing writers of her
generation. Some of the book's most enjoyable sections show off her
wicked eye for social satire, most evident here in her skewering of
all representatives of organized religion. Roy Dial is a
deacon-cum-automobile salesman who soaks little old ladies but
turns over his proceeds to the Baptist Church; he slithers around
town repossessing the cars of those down on their luck. There is
also an exquisite sequence involving Harriet's brief stay at Bible
camp, with a director given to bellowing "Praise the Lard!" and his
sugary wife whose goal is to get all the campers to sign an
"Abstinence Covenant."

The most important subtext in The Little Friend is the relations
between blacks and whites in this small Mississippi town. The
material here is strong enough to fill an entire novel, especially
the implicit contrast between the unapologetic racism of the
Ratliffs (in an early scene Danny and Farish entertain themselves
by randomly shooting at blacks fishing in the creek) and the more
complicated but no less vicious racism of the Cleves. Edie is fond
of saying that it makes no difference whether people's skin is
"black or white or purple," but when one of the great-aunts dies it
occurs to no one in the family to inform the black maid who worked
for her for thirty years, who lives without a telephone in an area
known as "Niggertown." Harriet loves Ida, her own family's
housekeeper, like a mother, but the family makes her drink out of a
separate glass. Such details do much to contribute to the novel's
faintly anachronistic feel; it is a shock to learn (from a casual
mention of the Panama Canal transfer) that it must take place in
the late 1970s, not, as one would think from the way the blacks are
treated, in the 1950s or the 1960s.

But while The Little Friend contains the framework for many
different novels, all of them potentially very good, the book that
it actually turns out to be is not entirely satisfactory. A part of
the trouble is Tartt's focus on Harriet, who is only vaguely
likable at the beginning and grows less and less appealing as the
book goes on. This is not entirely Harriet's fault; it is the novel
that fails her, not the other way around. Though The Little Friend
resembles a thriller even less than The Secret History, it keeps
insisting that it is one, with a number of gory escapades that seem
to function solely to keep the pages turning. In one scene, Harriet
and Hely break into Eugene's Mission to steal a cobra that belongs
to a visiting evangelical. (They are nearly caught, of course.) The
novel's climax is an even more preposterous confrontation between
Harriet and Danny at the town's water tower, which hinges upon a
ladder breaking at just the right moment. These scenes, loaded with
action as they are, prevent Tartt from looking long enough at
Harriet to give her the kind of character development that is
necessary for a satisfying coming-of-age story. When, at the very
end of the novel, Harriet is finally allowed to realize what has
been apparent to the reader for some time, the abrupt conclusion
cuts the book off before she can come to grips with the truly
serious thing that she has done.

It's a shame that Tartt has been unable to harness the real
psychological terror of her material. The murder of children, after
all, has been a gothic staple since the days of the Brothers Grimm.
The fact that this theme is lately most often on display in
film--most recently in The Blair Witch Project and the
stalker-movie parodies of the Scream series--may only be a sign of
its deeper relevance in contemporary American culture. But Tartt
has a good deal of company: in a summer that was interrupted weekly
by reports of new child abductions, Alice Sebold's novel The Lovely
Bones was hardly a surprise success. Like The Little Friend, The
Lovely Bones opens with the murder of a child, in this case
fourteen-year-old Susie, who narrates the book from heaven,
observing the responses of her family to her death. Parts of
Sebold's book are overly cute--each person gets their own heaven
tailored to their personal preferences, which in Susie's case
includes a duplex with a view of a dog run--and there are moments
of outright sentimentality, but she appeals purely and plainly to
the emotions in a way that Tartt's considerably more enigmatic book
does not. Sebold's message is deeply, if falsely, consoling:
despite her rape and murder, Susie winds up safe in her heaven,
with her duplex and her dogs. And her book focuses firmly on the
living; the corpse quickly vanishes from sight, both literally and
figuratively.

Tartt's books are neither simple nor sentimental, and her dark
visions, whether of privileged New England undergraduates or
decaying figures of the Old South, leave a very powerful imprint.
But she has not yet figured out how to channel her interest in
mortality--which is, after all, a subject of the most primary
significance--into the force that it needs to be for her literature.
At the moments when her books would force her to take death
seriously, she retreats into the haven of genre, of fast action and
fast talking. Ten years ago, this could be taken as a sign of an
inexperienced writer; now it is hard to be as generous. Many good
novels are not great literature. That is Donna Tartt's real trap,
which she has yet to escape.

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