The Secret History in The Bookshelf

May 09, 2021 Owen DeVries rated it it was amazing

In Alfred Hitchcock's film Rope (1948), based in part on the Leopold and Loeb murder case of 1924, two students are inspired by the teachings of a Nietzschean prep school housemaster (played by James Stewart in perhaps his most atypical role) to commit a murder. In their zeal to go "beyond good and evil," they strangle a former classmate, and almost flaunt the evidence to enhance their sense of superiority. Much of the horror in this film comes from the strange motivation of the killers - after In Alfred Hitchcock's film Rope (1948), based in part on the Leopold and Loeb murder case of 1924, two students are inspired by the teachings of a Nietzschean prep school housemaster (played by James Stewart in perhaps his most atypical role) to commit a murder. In their zeal to go "beyond good and evil," they strangle a former classmate, and almost flaunt the evidence to enhance their sense of superiority. Much of the horror in this film comes from the strange motivation of the killers - after all who commits murder as part of an intellectual quest for self-actualization?

Donna Tartt wrestles with a very similar scenario in her unconventional novel The Secret History, a murder mystery in reverse (like Hitchcock's film) starts with the crime, and then tantalizes the audience not with "who done it" but rather the more unsettling question of why. Tartt's novel begins in medias res with four friends pushing a classmate off a precipice to his death. The rest of the novel unravels the convoluted steps by which these college students came to commit this crime, and charts the chilling aftermath of the murder.

The underlying inspiration for the act in this instance comes not from a Nietzschean teacher, but rather via the influence of a soft-spoken and kindly professor of classics, who teaches these five students ancient Greek. His relationship with this small group of undergraduates develops into an unhealthy cult of personality with a distinctively pagan flavor. By gradual steps his coterie of followers become obsessed with bacchanalian rites, a path which inevitably leads to a vicious spiral of bloodshed.

There is much to admire in Tartt's novel, but it is especially laudable for how persuasively she chronicles the steps from studying classics to committing murder. This is a difficult transition to relate in a believable manner, and all the more difficult given Tartt's decision to tell the story from the perspective from one of the most genial of the conspirators. Her story easily come across as implausible - or even risible - in its recreation of Dionysian rites on a Vermont collage campus, and its attempt to convince us that a mild-mannered transfer student with a taste for ancient languages can evolve, through a series of almost random events, into a killer. Yet convince us does, and the intimacy with which Tartt brings her readers into psychological miasma of the unfolding plot is one of the most compelling features of The Secret History.

A telltale scene, reveling this author's mastery, comes early in the novel. Richard Papen, our narrator, has just been allowed to join the small clique of students who take almost all of their classes from the charmingly eccentric classics professor Julian Morrow. At his first class, Morrow delivers and eloquent, but ominous, talk about the ancient Greeks' comfort with the irrational - which the professor contrasts with the Roman's obsession with order and attendant attempt to eliminate, or ignore, the dark side of human dealings. This interlude evokes in brilliant strokes Morrow's charisma, his erudition, and the hothouse atmosphere of his classroom. Yet the philosophical values that the professor sets out here foreshadow many of the later incidents in this smartly plotted book. This is Tartt at her best, deliciously blending the abstract and concrete, the theoretical and the practical, the present charged with the historical past and all the fatalistic aspects of the unfolding future.

Even though the novel is set in Vermont, with a few scenes overseas or on the West coast, the Mississippi-born Tartt somehow brings to bear a Southern Gothic atmosphere to her story. The setting, Hampden College, resembles Bennington, where Tartt transferred in 1982, after first gaining some notoriety for her work under the direction of Barry Hannah at Ole Miss, and the plot parallels to some degree the unsolved case of a missing Bennington student from the 1940s. Yet Tartt's fascination with the paradoxical ways violence can coexist with refinement and delicacy is reminiscent of Eudora Welty, Flannery O' Connor and those other Southern ladies who mix an extra does of Id in their Superego.

The Secret History is, by any measure, a significant fiction, and arguably the book that tilted the scales away from the minimalist 1980s fictions with their Raymond Carveresque starkness, and toward the more maximalist sensibility that has been in the ascendancy in recent years. In short, new millennium readers will do well to acquaint themselves with this large talent with the small oeuvre, who would deserve a place in the contemporary canon of only on the basis of this gripping novel. ...more

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