Book Review: The Secret History by Donna Tartt

From the very first page, I adored the writing in Donna Tartt’s The Secret History. It’s such beautiful writing with a compelling plotline. It’s revealed in the prologue that a group of college students murdered one of their classmates, and the rest of the book is delving into what led up to the murder and what happened after. It’s not a who-dun-it but a why-dun-it. It’s very atmospheric, and many deem it the epitome of dark academia with its studious, mysterious, haunting vibe of Gothic literature. 

The novel has a few problems, but it’s overall a very investing, gripping read. I don’t have very much to say about the first half of the novel, since it’s all praise. When we get to the actual death in the chronological narrative, which happens in the middle of the book, the book starts to go downhill, though the book started on such a high note and didn’t travel downward too much. It was still an enjoyable read, but it lost some of its momentum. A part of that was intentional, since it was supposed to convey that life goes on in its humdrum, if dully stressful way after such a climactic event of committing murder and getting away with it. But I think Tartt could have taken the narrative in a slightly different direction to make it more psychologically interesting. 

All of the characters were compelling, but I thought that Tartt tried too hard to deteriorate their image near the end to justify the group growing apart and imploding. I liked the degradation of the characters for the sake of showing the extent of Richard’s disillusionment and romanticization of his surroundings at the beginning, but I did think one plot point went too far. *Spoilers ahead* The incest definitely had no place in the novel. I would have appreciated the ending a lot more if the violence at the hotel had arisen solely out of the dynamic between Henry and Charles, which could have led to the antagonism quite naturally without throwing an incestual relationship with Camila into the mix. I thought it was going too far for shock value when subtlety would have served much better. 

But that is the only specific plot point that I had issue with. I love books about tight-knit group dynamics, books that have unreliable narrators that come to self-awareness, and books that delve into the psyche after committing murder (one of my favorite books is Crime and Punishment by Dostoevsky, even though Raskolnikov’s aftermath is quite the opposite of the students in Tartt’s novel), so this book was right up my alley.