Modernized Mythology

Donna Tartt’s A Secret History has been around since the early 90’s.  It’s not a book you hear much about these days, but a small but surprising number of readers put the book on their list of all-time favorites.  Her latest heavyweight novel, The Goldfinch, made a stir in the Booker competition and has been getting quite a bit of press (not all of it good).  Never read her at all, so A Secret History seemed like the place to start.

I did find the book interesting to think about, but maybe less interesting to read.  It’s a story about a young student from backwater California who enters college at a small exclusive rural East coast liberal arts school (probably Bennington College, where Tartt went to school).  Because he’s already studied some ancient Greek in California (not so likely), he quickly joins a small and very exclusive group of students who are studying the Classics very intensively with a single idiosyncratic and isolated professor. This sounds more like Oxford than Bennington, but I guess anything was possible in those lefty days.  I don't find it believable that a young student with his limited background would be instantly comfortable in the rarified and sophisticated air that surrounds this particular group, nor does it seem likely that he would be quickly embraced and trusted by such a secretive and exclusive group. But I guess we just have to set plausibility aside. The story gets less believable as we proceed.  The group ends up murdering one of their own, and the second half of the book traces the inevitable decline that the initial murder triggers.  One by one they fall apart, and at the end of the book they are mere shadows of their former selves. No plot surprises here; we know in the first few pages what’s going to happen.  Watching it unfold is supposed to be the fun part.

Bennington College: Breeding ground for evil?

There’s absolutely nothing likeable about any of these characters.  They’re all selfish, excessively indulgent, substance-abusing, snobby smartasses in various proportions, and the adults in the book aren’t particularly attractive either.  There’s nobody to like here, but that’s we’re not supposed to like them.  Rather we observe them under stress, almost like watching lab rats that have been injected with an experimental chemical. It ain't pretty.

The narrative is handled quite skillfully.  We understand the major events of the plot, but we don’t witness them directly in the plot.  There’s lots of indirection and subtlety here.  And the gradual mood shift through the book is also quite interesting.  The first half of the book takes place almost entirely within the inner circle of friends, and the atmosphere is downright claustrophobic. It’s a small group, and their incestuous obsessions (yes, sometimes literally) and selfish concerns take up all the air in the room.  All of it.  There is no relief for the reader, no fresh breeze, not even a view from the outside, and that made this part of the book very unappealing, unrealistic, and monochromatic for me.  But in the second half very gradually the focus shifts back to the real world, and that shift is fascinating to observe.   The more the characters have to deal with the real world the less well they fare.

It’s also a book about ideas, mostly Greek philosophy, but also ideas from other times and places. I’m often fascinated by fiction that attempts to illustrate and draw consequences from abstract ideas, and I did appreciate that about the book very much. One thing to read about the contrast between Apollo and Dionysus in a philosophy text, quite another to see it play out very explicitly in a full novel. The book is almost an extended parable, a warning about what can happen when the human psyche is pushed to extremes.

The last hundred pages unfold nicely; it’s a page-turner by the end, and the denouement comes off well.

There’s a lot to think about here, and the atmosphere is haunting. But if it’s redemption you’re after, look elsewhere. Here you’ll find distasteful amoral behavior, sometimes superficially justified by circumstance or philosophy, sometimes simply allowed by individual inadequacy. Despite the interesting ideas and the sharply focused writing (or perhaps because of them), we end up weighed down by the banality of evil.