The Secret History is one of those books that I know will occupy my mind for a long time to come. The novel tells a story of murder, its harrowing effects on those who commit and keep the crime a secret, and the lengths that the rich, elitist, and pretentious Classics students of the fictional Hampden College will go to in order to keep the public and police from finding out a farmer was found dead on his own land one autumn night after a drunken attempt to summon the God Dionysus through ancient Grecian methods studied in class and known by their professor. Following this, the students also have to keep the seemingly unsuspicious death of a fellow Classics student, Edmund "Bunny" Corcoran, a secret after he found out what had really happened on the night when four of the students returned home claiming to have hit a deer with their car when he met them anxious and blood-stained. However, it is not just the plotline full of twists and turns that managed to amaze me when I read the novel. Rather, I was lured in by the somewhat boring narrator at the center of it all called Richard Papen. Papen is a student from California who is on scholarship at Hampden and he is often trying to keep that a secret in a great effort not to reveal that he doesn't come from wealth like his fellow classmates assume he does similarly to themselves. For many readers who are drawn to this book, I believe they can find themselves in Papen and even look to adore him at first. He's the middle-class kid who got a full ride into an incredibly impressive and boast-worthy school, is accepted by his rich friends who spend their weekends gallivanting at family-owned mini-mansions in the countryside, has a beautiful girl who flirts with him all the time at the drop of a dime and is accepted into the most selective class at the university taught by a suspicious and affluent professor who doesn't accept more than a dollar for his yearly salary that allows the students to do incredibly questionable things with the course of the class. Although things start to turn sour once he becomes an accessory to two murders, I can't think of a middle-class person of scholarly intellect who wouldn't want to be him. He goes to a beautiful school for free, is loved by classmates, and does essentially whatever he wants because those same friends take him on all of their luxurious weekend trips. If anything, Richard's character feels like a self-insert rather than a character with distinctive traits and actions as opposed to his friends Bunny, Camilla, Charles, Francis, and Henry all of whom have distinctive personalities and components to their character arc that make them memorable, desirable, or obnoxious. Also, I enjoyed that though the author herself is a female, she writes very convincing male characters and highlights the blunt and not always caring or compassionate way they yearn for women instead of in the way some other female authors wrote them to be.
Graphic: Addiction, Alcoholism, Alcohol, and Death
Moderate: Violence, Suicide, and Antisemitism
Minor: Racism, Racial slurs, Gaslighting, and Death of parent