The Secret History
By Donna Tartt
Publication Year: 1992
Type: Fiction
Genre: contemporary, crime, mystery
Read on 2018-08-28
View additional specs on this book in Muhan’s 2018 Reading Survey ➞
★★★☆☆
I kind of hate this book.
It’s probably better than my opinion towards its subject matter, which I find extremely distasteful, mostly in terms of Camilla. She is literally characterized as Object and the subject of entirely un-interrogated abuse, implied rape, and casual and consistent objectification by all the other characters. Richard, our narrator (a Nick to Henry’s Gatsby I suppose), goes so far as to explicitly describe fantasizing about violently assaulting and raping her? And this is? Just kind of glossed over? As her own character, Camilla exhibits almost no agency - probably the only choice she makes or stance she ever takes is rejecting Richard, which is immediately qualified by her profession of love for another man.
As an aside, for almost the entire book I couldn’t stop thinking about what kind of a person Donna Tartt is to write men and women the way she does. The themes of ego and power are fine but there’s so little by way of consistent points ABOUT these themes that in the end I just feel like she’s gone to all this trouble of trashing these boys for zero effect.
My main gripe is that Donna Tartt does this thing where a character will suddenly behave erratically or reveal something wild they did in the past, and then Richard, Tartt’s Mary-Sue exposition mule, will in exceedingly verbose and tortuous fashion rationalize for that action to the reader. These passages seldom reveal anything about Richard as our unreliable narrator. The sheer wordiness makes this less apparent such that, at a distance, Tartt might just have you thinking you were just too stupid to pick up on all the clues she’s left when in fact she just did a poor job setting up and introducing key characters. This is especially true of Julian, who I expected would play a bigger part - not necessarily in action but at least in the psyches of the gang.
