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What it argues
The Secret History opens with its ending: the narrator, Richard Papen, tells us on the first page that his friend Bunny is dead, and that he and four other students killed him. The novel then unspools backward and forward from that fact, explaining how a group of classics students at a small Vermont college called Hampden came to commit a murder, and what happened to them afterward. Tartt's structural gambit is that there is no mystery about who did it — the mystery is the how and the why, which turn out to be stranger and more disturbing than a conventional thriller would allow.
At the center of the novel is Julian, a charismatic classics professor who has gathered a small, exclusive group of students who study only with him. Richard, an outsider from California pretending to be something he isn't, is admitted to this circle and slowly absorbed into its ethos — an obsessive devotion to the Greeks, to beauty, to the idea that the divide between the ancient world and the modern one is a kind of poverty. What the group has actually done before Richard arrives, and what they do to maintain their secret, is the novel's true subject: not murder as crime but murder as a consequence of ideas taken too seriously.
What it gets right
- 1.
The inverted mystery structure — we know who died and who did it from page one — shifts the reader's attention from whodunit to why, which turns out to be a far more disturbing question.
- 2.
Julian's pedagogy is essentially cult formation: he creates a group that sees itself as superior, isolated, and exempt from ordinary moral constraints, and the murder is the logical end of that process.
- 3.
Richard's outsider status — his California origins, his family's poverty, his social performance of belonging — is the lens through which the reader is invited to find these people glamorous and then complicit in finding them glamorous.
What it covers
Who wrote it
Donna Tartt is an American novelist born in 1963 in Greenwood, Mississippi. She studied at Bennington College, which provided some of the material for The Secret History, her debut novel published in 1992. She has published two subsequent novels: The Little Friend (2002) and The Goldfinch (2013), which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. She is known for writing slowly and at length, with a decade or more between books. She divides her time between New York and Virginia.
