“Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it.”
If there is one thing that author Donna Tartt is good at, it’s being able to immerse her readers in a way that you forget that you aren’t actually in her book, you’re still in the real world. Two words that I would use to describe this book: discomfort and paranoia. All of the sounds, smells, and senses, provide that feeling as you are reading. The book is just under 200,000 words but by the very first sentence, you know that one of the characters is going to die and it is the group that conspires to do it. The narrator, Richard Papen, is an unhappy, desperate, and impressionable character who is a student in the classics program of his liberal arts college, Hampden College. He believes that his fatal flaw is his morbid longing for the picturesque or in other words, he lives for the aesthetic. When he arrives at Hampden, he quickly becomes obsessed with a prestigious and preppy group who are students of the Ancient Greek course and their professor, Julian Morrow.
Richard comes from an abusive and poor background so it’s understandable that he wants to be able to immerse himself in this group of wealthy people. He would do anything to befriend them, dine with them, anything to become one of them. He is able to do so by being accepted into the course and slowly starting to be included in their meetups, vacations, dinner parties, etc.
But they also begin including him in their indulging in ever-spiraling hedonism, and murder.
Towards the end of the book, the group is decimated, two are dead, some have dropped out, and once again, Richard is left all alone. He is also the only one that just can’t seem to forget what happened while the others are unwilling to return and remember that fateful year.
All of the characters are morally gray, horrible people but you can’t help but love them. They all believe that they are living a life of poetry and fulfillment but we, the readers, know that they aren’t. Donna Tartt warns us during the course of the book that if you live your life without regard for others, and only focus on pleasure and selfish desires, it will lead to lasting pain, damaged relationships, and death.
I’d like to quickly touch upon sexuality in the book, considering that most of the main characters are in no way straight besides Bunny and Camilla. There is queerness in the book, but it’s not shown in the best way. So, if you are considering reading The Secret History, please use caution since (trigger warning) there are mentions of slut shaming, homophobia, racist comments, sexual assault, suicide, alcoholism, drug abuse, murder, fatphobic comments, incest, and hate speech.