Photo credit: Elizabeth
Servants of the Gods
THE SECRET HISTORY
By Donna Tartt.
524 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $23.
Homer. Virgil. Milton. Xenophon. Shakespeare. Sophocles. Plato. Alexander the Great. Aeschylus. Historical figures one would last have encountered in high school literature or history loom large in Donna Tartt's debut novel, The Secret History; they are studied by a group of socialite, aloof, and (almost excessively) erudite college students under the tutelage of one Julian Morrow who, when not teaching the ancient greats, is said to associate with contemporary ones—Gertrude Stein, George Orwell, unspecified Arab emirs. It is this clique/cult which the Nick Carraway-esque narrator, Richard Papen, envies, joins, learns the secrets of, and eventually mourns. And Ms. Tartt expertly maneuvers her reader through it all, step by hazardous step, from the very first page—a murder already mentioned in the first dozen words—to the stricken and beautiful last.One reason why the novel immediately entices is Ms. Tartt's masterful narrative of how Richard comes to join the group. Raised in a dreary suburb by the plainest parents imaginable, Richard seeks happiness without quite knowing what it is—at a state school, he studies pre-med because "money, you see, was the only way to improve my fortunes, doctors make a lot of money, quod erat demonstrandum" (quotations in Greek and Latin are liberally, but (remarkably enough) not pretentiously, strewn about) before transferring to a swanky liberal arts college and spying the members of the group wandering about: Henry, the fabulously rich arch-intellectual; Francis, the not-so-closeted homosexual with spectacular fashion sense; Charles and Camilla, beautiful twins who take Richard under their wing; and Bunny, the crass but everyone's-best-friend high school athlete-star who is also the victim of the murder on the first page—at the hands of the rest of the group, no less. Being an outsider is a sensation both familiar and deeply discomfiting to everyone; the gratifying and beautiful absorption of Richard to their group—to their daily classes, begun with such phrases as "I hope we're all ready to leave the phenomenal world and enter into the sublime?"; to their dinner parties, replete with lamb chops and aged cognac; to Francis's weekend house, with its own groundskeeper and boathouse—at once strengthens our sympathy for the son of the gas-station owner and inflames our unspoken desire to occupy Richard's position.
Then comes along the most quote-unquote interesting event of the book, and its consequences: the students (minus Richard) attempt to reenact a Bacchanal, an Ancient Greek rite involving dancing, intoxication, sex, and, if successful, the summoning of Dionysus, the god of wine, fertility, and religious ecstasy. Suffice to say that they are successful. The brash and impulsive Bunny threatens to give away the events that transpire during the Bacchanal, and it is this threat that drives the murder and the story thereafter. And here lies the primary shortcoming of the novel: its biggest contrivance, somehow rendered not only plausible but enviable by Ms. Tartt's character- and dialogue-writing (one is inclined to believe anything Henry describes articulately yet sheepishly), is soon thereafter demoted to being merely the cause of Bunny's murder. The group's memories of the night itself is limited to sensory flashes such as "torches, dizziness, singing [, w]olves howling around us and a bull bellowing in the dark;" they, scarred by the night's events, do not attempt a repeat, and so Richard (and we readers) never learn any more about it. Indeed, for the remainder of the novel, the group barely even mentions the Bacchanal—a true pity, given the laborious set-up for a genuinely interesting plot twist that would have formed the crux of any other novel.
In the aftermath of the Bacchanal, faced with the prospect of exposure due to Bunny's malice or drunkenness, the group plots and then hides Bunny's murder; during this narrative, we come to see the dark sides of the other members, and are treated to Richard's nostalgia for Bunny's presence. Over half of the novel, in fact, concerns the psychological and legal fallout facing the friends after their betrayal. But your correspondent found himself ambivalent about Ms. Tartt's choice of victim. True, only Bunny is reckless enough to be considered a risk, but he is also consistently described as Jew-hating, Catholic-bashing, and homophobic, not to mention cruel to those closest to him—his sharp tongue is described as "a metaphoric vial of nitroglycerine […] which, from time to time, he allowed us a glimpse of, unless anyone forget it was always there with him," and Henry's fastidiousness, Francis's homosexuality, the twins' orphanhood, and Richard's relative poverty all become fodder for his almost elegant jabs. Which aren't even to delve into his everyday carelessness, callousness, and crudeness. Thus, when the murder occurs, our portrait of Bunny is the friend of everyone who is in fact the friend of no one—the thieving, insecure, bigoted, and above all cruel man-child who may not deserve to be murdered but who can't be mourned, either. Thus, Bunny is the logical, but hardly perfect, choice: summoning the requisite disgust at Henry, the brains of the group, and company felt forced, and your correspondent would hardly complain if a Bunny-like individual were to disappear from his own life. A more sympathetic Bunny would doubtless have served the novel well.
Though Ms. Tartt's choice and characterization of victim be less than ideal, her unspooling of the remainder of the novel—and of the characters' minds and consciences—is nothing short of superlative. Parallels with Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment abound (and even a direct quotation is thrown in late in the novel, in case the parallels hadn't been noticed), and whereas the murder in that book is eventually redeemed by remorse and religious revelation, the absence of anything resembling regret on any of the characters' part—except when law enforcement agents begin to suspect that the group had a hand in Bunny's death—is made up for by the oozing, encroaching paranoia, arguments, and mental destabilization. The twins, normally uncannily united, begin living separately; one group member is arrested for drunk driving; everyone lies to, intimidates, and avoids each other in a futile effort to save their own skins, when the only thing that needs saving is their consciences. The group's disintegration and tragic conclusion are beflecked with life and color: Richard's anxiety manifests in his "heart limping in [his] chest"—a "pitiful muscle, sick and bloody, pulsing against [his] ribs"—and his horror at his newly backstabbing friends comes to life in the hysterical, hyper-saturated climax, which is no less powerful for being predictable. During this scene, hearing the friends damn each other—"You've ruined my life, you son of a bitch," "The stupidest thing I ever did in my life was listen to you"—one cannot help but grieve for all that was lost; scenes like these almost read like a work of theater—one might even say, like the best of the Greek tragedies, those suffused with enough pathos to endure two and a half millennia.
Late in the novel, Richard remarks about Professor Morrow that he is "ambiguous, a moral neutral, […] watchful, capricious, and heartless." It's a striking turnaround from the image of the eccentric but benevolent aesthete presented at the start of the novel, and one wonders whether his students absorbed not only his teachings but also his personality. The moral failings of all the characters, cast against the hedonistic and limitless vista of an elite liberal arts college, come together in a supremely enjoyable story which at the same time warns of the madness in all of us which, if we confuse our privilege with power and dare to think ourselves gods, can so easily tip into bloodshed.
[Written 2020; lightly revised 2022]