pinkmooon 's review for:

The Secret History by Donna Tartt
2.0

The perfect palate cleanser after Absalom, Absalom!, I devoured this book on a dull weekend visiting family. I don't think it's very good, but it kept me completely absorbed in a casual, breezy fashion, so I can understand why it's such a bestseller.
As an English and Classics graduate, I appreciated being able to understand pretty much every reference to either subject in the novel, but the Classics stuff really is no more than window-dressing. The secret club of aesthetically-devoted pretty rich people guided by an extremely orthodox unorthodox academic was absurd, but charmingly so. It's a great framing device that could have propelled a more interesting story.

Richard, our protagonist, is a remarkably dull creature possessing almost no sexual instinct whatever. The sexuality of the novel is perhaps its most curiously vacuous element - it's not really believable that anyone fucks, and it's always insincere when they claim they do or even that they desire to. Richard's neighbour Judy seems almost believable in that front, but Richard finds her quietly repulsive, despite his friendships with a cast of quietly repulsive people.

His weakness as a narrator allows Tartt to skip over without comment what seemed to be the crux of the novel - Dionysian sensuality, the Bacchanalian revel from which the mystery/thriller takes off and sells the book to a mass audience. That this book is a glorified Dan Brown thriller is dismaying, because if it was a little less willing to be cosy and non-challenging - say, if our intelligent narrator actually thought in an intelligent, introspective way - it might've been a more exciting and ambitious novel. Sadly, it's just too much of a cartoon to really recommend to anyone, unless of course, they're taking a plane journey anytime soon and don't want to sleep or distract themselves with their laptop.