“A morbid longing for the picturesque at all costs.”

The Secret History, by Donna Tartt

Summary

Under the influence of a charismatic classics professor, a group of clever, eccentric misfits at an elite New England college discover a way of thought and life a world away from the humdrum existence of their banal contemporaries. But their search for the transcendent leads them down a dangerous path, beyond human constructs of morality, and they slip gradually from obsession to corruption and betrayal, and at last—inexorably—into evil.

My Thoughts

Okay, so I’d been hearing about The Secret History for a while when I finally got around to reading it. Everyone I knew had heard about it if not read it; it’s a staple of the Dark Academia genre which I’ve been obsessively devouring for the entirety of the spring semester of my freshman year. This was the first book I read from the genre, and it sent me down a wormhole, honestly.

This is not everyone’s favorite book, and it does not have to be. The structure is very different from most books: it’s a murder mystery told in chronological order by the main character, Richard, a couple decades after the murder itself. We begin the book in the very first chapter by learning exactly who is murdered; the story itself is about the background to the murder, why it happened, and what happened after. It’s slow and character focused on our main cast of six brilliant classics students. Honestly, our main cast are so pretentious, snobby, elite, and removed from the rest of the school that when Richard does get around to interacting with the rest of the school, you’re jarringly reminded that the main plot takes place in the 1980s and everyone around him is perpetually high or drunk. You’re not really meant to love the main cast; if you do, that’s your own problem. You’re meant to dive into their psyches, to understand these weird, snobby, kind of twisted and removed people who you can’t help but root for at times. As someone who is unabashedly a lover of the classics, and can absolutely be an academic elitist at times (though she does her best to not be a horrible person about it), I love learning about the characters.

It’s a slow book at times. I personally love character-focused books—to me, plot is less important than your characters. I need characters to come alive, to feel real, to really understand a book, so I don’t mind that the plot takes a backseat or that our narrator is literally oblivious to the plot occurring around him for the first half of the book. I mean, the first half of the book is literally our main cast just drinking a lot, smoking a lot, studying the classics, and kind of being assholes as we get to know them well. We learn about their families, their backstories, how they react to different situations, and more. The slow pace gives us time to get to know the rest of the characters. My recommendation is to give a book a try; try to read the first few chapters and see how you feel. It’s not for everyone, but it could be for you. I personally loved the book, like loved-loved-loved it, but not everyone will.

Review: ★ ★ ★ ★ ★

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