Back to murder
Back to murder
Narrative Architecture #8: Donna Tartt's "The Secret History" and the campus suspense novel (spoilers)
This is the eighth chapter in a long-simmering miniseries called “Narrative Architecture” about storytelling choices in fiction. There are many ways to tell a story, and in this series, I’ll examine the literary choices a particular author made and their impact on the story at hand. This week, I’ll engage with Donna Tartt’s classic campus novel of suspense, The Secret History (Knopf, 1992). I spoil a lot of the book, so I’d try to read this gem before browsing this post.
This post is a revised version of an essay I composed as part of my MFA program at UNR.
“I suppose at one time in my life I might have had any number of stories, but now there is no other. This is the only story I will ever be able to tell” (Tartt 4). So ends the in medias res prologue of The Secret History on a tantalizing note.
Though a fictional “mystery” story, from the beginning we know who was killed and who did it. As a result, The Secret History is often known as a “whydunnit” as opposed to a “whodunnit.” And yet The Secret History is more than that. It’s also a coming-of-age novel with elements that seem torn from Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise or Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises. However, this story is a product of the 1990s: Richard Papen is the very literary narrator who transfers to liberal arts Hampden College and falls in with a clique of eccentric classics students. After the group accidentally kills a farmer while trying to summon the god Pan for a pagan orgy (let’s just skate over that idea), their classmate Edmund “Bunny” Corcoran, who was not invited to this event, blackmails the group and particularly its wealthy Machiavellian ringleader, Henry. So, they do what any slightly sociopathic group of classics students might do: they murder Bunny by pushing him off a cliff.
With the authorities on their tail, the second half of the novel becomes a suspense noir or Hitchcockian thriller like The Talented Mr. Ripley, Dial M for Murder, or Rope, as they try to evade suspicion amidst their deteriorating mental states. In added complication, darker secrets come to the fore, like the incest of the twin characters, Charles and Camilla. And yet, though the novel climaxes with Henry taking his own life (and the fall) for the affair, the main cast of Richard, Francis, Charles, and Camilla basically get away with murder, though their lives are forever tarnished in the aftermath.
Perhaps it’s the blend of classic genre stories that lends The Secret History its appeal, an element heightened by the way the characters dress formally at school to evoke the class and status of characters in a Patricia Highsmith or Fitzgerald novel. Lacking cellphones or other modern devices (aside from Xerox machines), the novel achieves a timeless quality that gives it a gravitas that is hard to shake.
However, when I first read the novel in high school, I was maddened by the ending. Why did we need the random incest plotline? How could a novel invoke genre conventions (such as hardboiled detectives on the main character’s tail) and then drop them so casually by the end? Mostly I think I was frustrated that the characters were not caught, that the wheels of justice failed, that a noir declined to show its characters punished. Now I think more fondly of this decision. The characters are punished, but in a different way. Like in the Greek tragedy cycle The Oresteia, the protagonists are technically bailed out by a deus ex machina, but they still suffer their own consequences, in time. (The incest plotline of course seems very intentional in drawing parallels to Greek tragedy). I think, like the aforementioned “classic” novels in this genre, that this is a book that benefits from re-reading and re-examining, one where it’s easier to see how ingenious the plot and arcs are constructed from afar than when you’re in the thick of it.
Fundamentally, though, for people of a certain background, The Secret History is also relatable as a coming-of-age college story, particularly to former liberal arts students at pretentious Northeastern colleges. While not everyone takes courses in ancient Greek, most students who travel away for college encounter the experience of trying to make friends, and sometimes breaking into, established cliques. Richard Papen’s slow-but-surely ingratiation into the Greek class’ friend group in the first couple acts of the book is thus an alluring narrative to many readers (perhaps also accounting for why the Harry Potter books are so popular, because they depict a time when strong friendships are formed among initial strangers):
His students… were imposing enough, and different as they all were they shared a certain coolness, a cruel, mannered charm which was not modern in the least but had a strange cold breath of the ancient world: they were magnificent creatures, such eyes, such hands, such looks—sic oculos, sic ille manus, sic ora ferebat. I envied them, and found them attractive; moreover this strange quality, far from being natural, gave every indication of having been intensely cultivated…. studied or not, I wanted to be like them. It was heady to think that these qualities were acquired ones and that, perhaps, this was the way I might learn them. (Tartt 31)
Here, Richard’s interiority depicts the seductive allure of joining the Greek clique at Hamden, a desire that causes him to make the devil’s bargain of dropping all of his other classes and becoming the pupil of the enigmatic Julian in every subject. Who (at least if in high school or early college) has not wanted to become a member of a select, “cool,” group of individuals? Tartt is using this near-universal desire to help the reader buy into the romance that Papen is himself buying into. Tartt’s interiority spells out Richard’s attraction to this group, a strategy that I could use more often in my own work, which tends to rely on spare images and dialogue to convey decision-making.
Richard’s buy-in to the group is critical for the book to succeed because this “special” group of people, despite their apparent cultivation, is toxic on every level of the building. The most toxic member is Bunny Corcoran, whose villainy is depicted in both scene and in summary, and in scenes told by other characters in dialogue-flashback. Like Robert Cohn, who exacerbates all the interpersonal problems in The Sun Also Rises, Bunny is the goat who drives the characters to their worst. When Richard first has lunch with Bunny and Bunny shafts him with the check (which Richard cannot afford), Henry’s decision to bail them out and his confrontation with Richard about Bunny’s pattern of behavior helps illuminate, on so many levels, the extent and replicability of Bunny’s grifts:
“He told you he was taking you out. Didn’t he?” [Henry asked].
[…] “Well, yes,” I said.
“And just happened to leave his wallet at home?”
“It’s all right.”
“It’s not all right,” Henry snapped. “It’s a terrible trick. How were you to know? He takes it on faith that whoever he’s with can produce tremendous sums at a moment’s notice. He never thinks about these things, how awkward it is for everyone….” (Tartt 61)
This exchange highlights the main problem with how the characters handle Bunny—though they are aware that he is a snob and serial con artist, they continue to tolerate and enable his behavior. The fact Bunny and Henry are still “friends” despite this tacit acknowledgement of his pathology, belies the cancer at the heart of the group, that because of social conventions Henry can’t shake off his freshman-year roommate. But Tartt’s ability to depict Bunny’s evolving and deteriorating relationship to the group is multifaceted, and goes beyond mere scene-storytelling. She deftly tells scenes through Henry’s dialogue as a flashback, such as when Henry recounts to Richard what transpired between him and Bunny in Rome:
“I’d hit [Bunny] harder than I meant to. His mouth fell open. My hand had left a big white mark across his cheek. All of a sudden the blood rushed back into it, bright red. He began to shout at me, cursing, quite hysterical, throwing wild punches at me…. I grabbed the diary and the translation and threw them in the stove—Bunny went for them, but I held him back until they started to go up—and then I yelled for whoever it was to come in. It was the chambermaid. She flew into the room, screaming in Italian so fast I couldn’t understand a word she said. At first I thought she was angry about the noise. Then I understood it wasn’t it at all. She’d known I was ill; there’d been hardly a sound from the room for days and then, she said excitedly, she’d heard all the screaming; she had thought I’d died in the night, perhaps, and the other young signor had found me, but as I was standing now in front of her, that was obviously not the case; did I need a doctor? An ambulance? Bicarbonato di soda?” (Tartt 191)
Even in this single paragraph, Tartt has achieved several impressive things. One, there’s a complete story in this apssage, full of several reversals and surprises (the slap, the destruction of the diary, the maid arriving, the maid’s unexpected reaction). This is also Henry telling us the story in dialogue, which is certainly an artifice—how many college students speak in semicolons?—but it works, and we forgive it, because it is so well-written, as immediate and vivid as a scene taking place in the narrative at present, rather than a murkier flashback. I wonder if this scene was originally written as a scene, and whether in revision she was asked to frame it like this. Whatever the rationality, I think it works, despite itself.
And yet Tartt also knows when to speed up the memories of Bunny, such as when Richard explains the gathering antipathy he harbored for the character:
By stages I grew to abhor him. Ruthless as a gun dog, he picked up with rapid and unflagging instinct the traces of everything in the world I was most insecure about, all the things I was in most agony to hide. There were certain repetitive, sadistic games he would play with me. He liked to entice me into lies: “Gorgeous necktie,” he’d say, “that’s a Hermès, isn’t it?”—and then, when I assented, reach quickly across the lunch table and expose my poor tie’s humble lineage. Or in the middle of a conversation he would suddenly bring himself up short and say: “Richard, old man, why don’t you keep any pictures of your folks around?” (Tartt 219)
This example of Richard speaking in summary evokes several specific moments in the style of montage. It presumes the passage of time while adding enough specific instances to add authenticity to Richard’s emotions. Tartt faces a tricky task—she has to depict the group’s decision to kill Bunny as both entirely justified (in their minds) and entirely damning (in actuality). This central challenge feels tied to classical tragedy. Just as Elektra and Orestes are technically justified in murdering their mother (who herself murdered their father), the Greek siblings are still committing murder themselves. There is no solace in their action, but the evidence for their decision must be rooted in the text. For Tartt, this evidence comes from in-scene memories, patterns of behavior, eclectic slights that have accumulated, and an Italian flashback sequence that reads as if it is coming to cinematic life on the page. The variety keeps the novel on-balance and effective.
All this tension builds to the astonishing moment when the group pushes Bunny off the cliff halfway through the book:
Everything was very still. From somewhere far away, in the woods, I heard the faint, inane laughter of a woodpecker.
“Tell me,” Bunny said, and I thought I detected for the first time a note of suspicion. “Just what the Sam Hill are you guys doing out here anyway?”
The woods were silent, not a sound.
Henry smiled. “Why, looking for new ferns,” he said, and took a step towards him. (Tartt 269)
Fade to black, section break. The quietness of the scene, and the restraint of the moment, adds to its effectiveness. The rest of the novel unspools from there, as the evade questioning by the detectives, confront the overbearing power of guilt at Bunny’s funeral, and descend into melodrama as the twins’ incest is revealed.
It’s all effective; unsatisfying on the first read but, when you read something the second time, you understand the ending and the logic Tartt is building towards. This re-framing of the inevitability in the reader’s mind that comes with the second read, renders the book more powerful and poignant.
As a result I’ve learned to forgive the excesses of the second half of The Secret History. On the first read I was baffled by the coda, in which Richard meets Henry in a dream-space reminiscent of Hell, as tacky and unearned. But in that scene Richard says:
“I looked at [Henry]. There was so much I wanted to ask him, so much I wanted to say; but somehow I knew there wasn’t time and even if there was, that it was all, somehow, beside the point” (Tartt 559).
It is beside the point! All the critiques of this book fail at some level, because, well, Donna Tartt wrote a perfect book here, a classic that evokes classics, 20th century and ancient, in combination with a coming-of-age college tale and noir. At least, these are all things I like, so it worked for me.
Works Cited
Tartt, Donna. The Secret History (Vintage Contemporaries: New York, 1992).