Beguiling, none of the characters I would want for friends
Never been so pleased to have a character killed off ( )

This book DESTROYED me, and I loved it.

The Secret History reads as a bit of a pastiche, albeit an understated one where none of the elements outstay their welcome. It's told by a Nick Carraway-esque narrator who slips into the heightened reality of a small private college in Vermont and finds himself enmeshed in a slow-burn thriller.

At first the novel has a fairy tale charm that I want to call gothic, but mythic may be a better word. In those early pages, we meet a quirky cast of characters who have seemingly stepped out of a Wes Anderson film, with all the differentiation of a Greek chorus. But as the story unreels, it becomes intensely psychological, inviting us into a (partial) understanding of their tangled interrelationships while failing to ask certain questions of our unreliable narrator.

This is a novel about complicity and the banality of evil. The closely observed narrative is funny, outrageous, and salacious, but it's also bizarrely plausible, despite the heightened reality. I never lost sight of the humanity of these characters or discarded my empathy for them because, after all, the reader is invited to complicity as well. (A reminder of this, I believe, is part of the intent of the haunting last scene.)

So yeah, this book was everything I want from a psychological novel. Every so often I'm reminded that I like literary fiction - this one hit the same spot as Fifth Business, Brideshead Revisited, and A Prayer for Owen Meany. Hopefully I can find more! ( )

I loved The Goldfinch and so wanted to read more of Donna Tartt. The Secret History sqaunders her considerable talent on a story and characters that I want to forget. I aspire to become a better person with each book. This one fails that test. ( )

Updated: My original review gave The Secret History a spectacular 4 stars. After a month's consideration, The Secret History is now in my very limited pantheon of 5-star reads.

"The dead appear to us in dreams," said Julian, "because that’s the only way they can make us see them; what we see is only a projection, beamed from a great distance, light shining at us from a dead star..."

I found The Secret History to be a fantastically sordid book about 6 classics majors set in Hampden College, a small liberal arts school in the middle of Vermont. Tartt's character development is world class: though each of the 6 characters are incredibly unlikeable and ignoble, I found mysteriously found myself totally engrossed in narrator Richard, Henry, Francis, Charles, Camilla, and Edmund (Bunny) were each up to and their their motivations.

Small, rural liberal arts college. Privileged kids acting badly in the 90s. Everyone smoking all the time. This hit close to home for some reason... ( )

Very disturbing and superbly written. There are parts of the book that are full of tragic beauty and horror - where the horror comes from things left unsaid and unwritten rather than words on the page.

I've had "The Secret History" on my reading radar for a long time. I now find myself very impressed, wanting to discover more books by Donna Tartt, yet ultimately unsatisfied. Let me explain. This group of students is supposed to have latched onto each other, with an almost obsessive mix of love and friendship, and to have had a very special relationship to their teacher. I can easily see how this can be perverted and lead everyone deeper and deeper into the darkness. What I did not see in the book are the bonds between the characters - which is a "show, not tell" problem, I believe. The reader is only told that there is an amazing friendship and connection between the characters and their teacher. I did not quite buy it. The subsequent descent into the abyss is chilling and believable - but it has no ground to stand on. ( )