The Secret History
by Donna Tartt

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Book Reviews of The Secret History

Book Review: The Secret Tragedy
Summary: 5 Stars

"And it is also natural for all to delight in works of imitation. ...though the objects themselves may be painful to see, we delight to view the most realistic representations of them in art, the forms for example of the lowest animals and of dead bodies" (1448b - lines 8-13).

The fact that Tartt reveals to her readers on the first page who is killed and who are the culprits necessitates the existence of something else as the main focal point of the story. Granted, we gradually come to find out the where and why and when of the murder and each moment is as suspenseful as the next, but Tartt's novel is unconventional in that it's main concern is not the murder itself, but the small steps that make it possible for a human being to commit it, and most importantly, the overwhelming aesthetics of it all. In this way, The Secret History is not unlike the great tragedies of old from Oedipus to The Great Gatsby.

According to Aristotle, the subject of a tragedy should neither be an overly good nor bad person; but rather "the intermediate kind of personage, a man not pre-eminently virtuous and just, whose misfortune...is brought upon him not by vice and depravity but by some error in judgment" (Poetics 1452b - line 33 -- 1453a - line 10). Tartt has followed this framework perfectly. At least in Richard's own view and description of his motivations and actions, we are meant to feel pity for his "fatal flaws" and feel as if his life could have been ours as easily as his. The catharsis we feel for his tragically flawed life is dominated by his unreliability, his limited, subjective narration. Nonetheless, whether or not Richard is depraved or not--in his situation, would any of us tell a different story? Richard's flaw is ultimately his perception of his Greek Class (his fellow murderers)--in his own words it is "[his] own fatal tendency to make interesting people good" (466).

The overarching unsolved mystery of the novel is the inscrutable subjectivity of Henry, Francis, Camilla, Charles, and especially Julian. Everything that Richard was an outsider to--the bacchanal, the secretive camaraderie, the exclusivity, the money and privilege, even the murder itself--was the object of his desire and imitation. His quite natural insecurity and his immature need for acceptance are his bane. The bane of all of them--once Richard has been assimilated into the group--is their inability to separate art from reality. To these Greek student elitists, death and ecstatic Dionysian frenzy evoke the same feeling: awe, excitement and terror. The harshness of beauty and the beauty of the grotesque compel them and drive them to unforeseeable ends. Tartt's lyrical language describing the surrealism of Richard's experience demonstrates such succumbing to beauty in trauma:

"Sometimes, when there's been an accident and reality is too sudden and strange to comprehend, the surreal will take over. Action slows to a dreamlike glide, frame by frame; the motion of a hand, a sentence spoken, fills an eternity. Little things-a cricket on a stem, the veined branches on a leaf-are magnified, brought from the background in achingly clear focus" (89).

Since we only get Richard's thoughts, we could easily be led to view the others as depraved and sick and our protagonist as the victim, but Tartt doesn't allow this. Richard's love of the others, even in his alienation from them, shows us that he sees them all as fated and tragic figures. After all, aren't we all slaves to our education in some way? Sure we draw our own conclusions and make our own decisions, but aren't these based fundamentally on all we have seen, heard, felt, talked about and experienced; subsequently, aren't all of these things external to us?

Tartt makes a great case for the tragic character of human experience, one of which Aristotle would have been proud. Is it not our imitation, ultimately, that leads to our actions? "Imitation is natural to man from childhood, one of his advantages over the lower animals beings this, that he is the most imitative creature in the world, and learns at first by imitation" (Poetics 1448b lines 5-8).

Summary of The Secret History

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• Mystery, Thriller & Suspense > Mystery