What I Am Reading: "The Secret History" by Donna Tartt

This book reminded me of something, but I haven’t managed to put my finger on what. It has a foreboding New England college setting as Shirley Jackson might, and a diffident upper class dramatis personae out of F. Scott Fitzgerald. “The Secret History” is structured as the memoir of a student at the fictional Hampden College in Vermont, who joins his clique of elite, eccentric classics students in murdering one of their own number. This killing is revealed at the beginning, and the novel details the prelude and aftermath. The ringleader of the student group has many wheels turning at once, and the narrator and reader are always a step away from learning exactly what is going on.

The main thing that this novel taught me is that you don’t have to be smart to study Classics. The murder victim , “Bunny” Corcoran, is a boorish, flaky layabout whom I am surprised his friends can stand in the first place. The group’s ringleader, Henry, is similarly well-characterized as a thoughtful, competent, and stoic figure attempting to live according to the ideals of the Ancient Greeks. Despite being much more responsible and much more of a scholar than Bunny is, both students are still the scions of wealthy families who have precluded themselves from attending more rigorous or exacting institutions of higher education, and will always have the option of working at the family business.

The entire novel has a wistful, somewhat melancholy air. Several times the narrator describes an event as having the hazy characteristics of a memory even as it is being experienced. The setting exists in a world of its own, and it wasn’t until late in the novel that I even figured out what time period it was supposed to be set in.  The cluster of oddball students and their roguish, captivating professor thrive for their remove from the world, shuttling between college and vacation home, propped up by their parents’ money. The narrator is the lone exception: a visitor to this rarefied atmosphere, from the dusty and shallow world of suburban California. As the reader, I felt a strong grasp of why a desire to be part of something large and important and accepting drove the narrator to help at least cover up a murder, when he had the option to stay out of the situation entirely.

 I think that the novel also captures well the experience of being close to a certain educator. At the time when their professor, Julian, breaks with them upon learning of their crime, the narrator claims that he had tried not to whitewash Julian. In attempting to criticize, he says,

“I could say that the secret of Julian’s charm was that he latched onto young people who wanted to fell better than everybody else; that he had a strange gift for twisting feelings of inferiority into superiority and arrogance. I could also say that he did this not through altruistic motives but selfish ones, in order to fulfill some egotistical impulse of his own… But still that would not explain the fundamental magic of his personality or why – even in the light of subsequent events – I still have an overwhelming wish to see him the way that I first saw him: as the wise old man who appeared to me out of nowhere on a desolate strip of road, with a bewitching offer to make all my dreams come true.” (p. 479).

This is a novel that found life in the strength of its characters. I will remember a scene where Henry, the natural leader, is contemplating a poisoning. He sets to learn about poisons through the tools at his disposal: attempting to translate a book on the subject by the medieval Persians. Scenes and ideas like these make “The Secret History” an interesting story about a murder, if one is looking for more than guesswork on who did the deed.

Postscript, 4/8/19 I’ve come to the conclusion that the story that The Secret History reminded me of was “Strawberry Spring” by Stephen King, about a sinister New England college fading into the mists of memory. One of the few King stories I really like.

Double Postscript, 12/31/19 After the accurate but somewhat embarrassing admission to associating The Secret History, a book I liked a lot, with a Stephen King story, I have further remembered the association of the mysterious and brooding campus atmosphere in Banquet for the Damned by Adam Nevill, and I think that that might be a better horror-campus association, despite the clear genre difference.