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A review by jwells
The Secret History by Donna Tartt
dark
mysterious
tense
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
One of those books that make me glad I gave up giving star ratings. I could hardly put it down and devoured it like popcorn, and yet I have all kinds of quibbles with it. It's like I had fun at the time, but don't respect myself in the morning. I'd have to give it a high rating, as a thriller, since it successfully held my rapt attention, but does it aspire to literariness? In that case, thumbs down.
In chapter one, I was desperately wishing Tartt had had an actual professor, or even a graduate student, read her manuscript, so that such a reader could have gently pointed out the wild fantasy of her premise that a university would allow a professor to force students to drop "all their other classes except mine" and that they'd let classics count for all the distribution requirements (even the lab science requirement? what, did reading Aristotle's Physics count? LOL) I've seen some diva-rockstar professors, but nobody has that kind of power. What's so special about Julian anyway, that the college would bend over backwards to his insane demands? Seems to me he could be instantly replaced by any freshly minted classics PhD, any year they wanted.
I was sure, based on how big of a reach this was, that Tartt was setting up Julian to be the villain, a manipulative mastermind that would pull all the strings until the murder happened. If that was the case, I didn't see it. He seemed like a vague, shallow, self-centered sort of fellow, who had not much idea what was going on, until the very final clue dropped. I didn't see any reason the plot demanded that his students couldn't take other classes, why they had to have this utterly bizarre one-professor college experience. Why not just have them sign up for their distribution requirements and then skip those classes, because they were such a Greek-obsessed little clique?
The only purpose Julian seemed to serve, was a lot of heavy-handed foreshadowing in chapter one. I was grateful when we didn't get a lot more of his teaching after that. Whew. Still, I wish there had been a classics academic beta reader. If nothing else, that person could have sorted out the mix up between Biblical and Attic Greek, which have been put into a blender here. I suppose if we are postulating 18 to 20 year olds who are fluent enough to converse in Attic Greek, we may as well add on that they also fluently read Biblical Greek. It's just not clear from the book that Tartt realizes they are different things. I am not a Greek scholar, but my understanding is that if you know Biblical (can read the New Testament), that doesn't mean you know Attic (can read Homer or Plato). Or vice versa.
How high of a standard should I hold the book to? Is it a fluffy genre thriller that just happens to be set on a college campus, so that all the Greek stuff is mere scene setting? Then, who cares about my nitpicking. Or is it supposed to be literary? In that case, another couple of editorial passes might have helped.
In chapter one, I was desperately wishing Tartt had had an actual professor, or even a graduate student, read her manuscript, so that such a reader could have gently pointed out the wild fantasy of her premise that a university would allow a professor to force students to drop "all their other classes except mine" and that they'd let classics count for all the distribution requirements (even the lab science requirement? what, did reading Aristotle's Physics count? LOL) I've seen some diva-rockstar professors, but nobody has that kind of power. What's so special about Julian anyway, that the college would bend over backwards to his insane demands? Seems to me he could be instantly replaced by any freshly minted classics PhD, any year they wanted.
I was sure, based on how big of a reach this was, that Tartt was setting up Julian to be the villain, a manipulative mastermind that would pull all the strings until the murder happened. If that was the case, I didn't see it. He seemed like a vague, shallow, self-centered sort of fellow, who had not much idea what was going on, until the very final clue dropped. I didn't see any reason the plot demanded that his students couldn't take other classes, why they had to have this utterly bizarre one-professor college experience. Why not just have them sign up for their distribution requirements and then skip those classes, because they were such a Greek-obsessed little clique?
The only purpose Julian seemed to serve, was a lot of heavy-handed foreshadowing in chapter one. I was grateful when we didn't get a lot more of his teaching after that. Whew. Still, I wish there had been a classics academic beta reader. If nothing else, that person could have sorted out the mix up between Biblical and Attic Greek, which have been put into a blender here. I suppose if we are postulating 18 to 20 year olds who are fluent enough to converse in Attic Greek, we may as well add on that they also fluently read Biblical Greek. It's just not clear from the book that Tartt realizes they are different things. I am not a Greek scholar, but my understanding is that if you know Biblical (can read the New Testament), that doesn't mean you know Attic (can read Homer or Plato). Or vice versa.
How high of a standard should I hold the book to? Is it a fluffy genre thriller that just happens to be set on a college campus, so that all the Greek stuff is mere scene setting? Then, who cares about my nitpicking. Or is it supposed to be literary? In that case, another couple of editorial passes might have helped.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Alcoholism, Gun violence, Homophobia, and Suicide
Moderate: Panic attacks/disorders, Blood, and Murder
Homophobic slurs from characters depicted as the assholes they are