[HN Gopher] The Secret History: A murder mystery that thrills 30...
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The Secret History: A murder mystery that thrills 30 years on
Author : benbreen
Score : 41 points
Date : 2022-12-19 22:00 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.bbc.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.bbc.com)
| stryan wrote:
| The Secret History is a fantastic book and one of my favourites.
| Reading it doesn't even feel like reading a murder mystery; the
| article talks about the first line saying Bunny's dead, but
| really you're introduced to the whole murder almost immediately.
| You already know who kills him, so the book ends up being a
| character study about the people who did it and why.
|
| I'm a bit disappointed that the article didn't talk about the
| Dark Academia aesthetic/subculture more. It's been floating
| around the internet well before TikTok (I remember seeing it back
| on Tumblr a decade ago, and I was actually first introduced to
| the book through a piece of fan fiction) and, like cottagecore, I
| suspect has far more influence on pop culture then people are
| aware of
| bccdee wrote:
| The prologue, which famously begins with "The snow in the
| mountains was melting and Bunny had been dead for several weeks
| before we came to understand the gravity of our situation,"
| gets a lot of love. For me, though, I realized I was reading
| something special in the opening paragraphs of the first
| chapter:
|
| > Does such a thing as "the fatal flaw," that showy dark crack
| running down the middle of a life, exist outside literature? I
| used to think it didn't. Now I think it does. And I think that
| mine is this: a morbid longing for the picturesque at all
| costs.
|
| > _A moi. L'histoire d'une de mes folies._
|
| > My name is Richard Papen. I am twenty-eight years old and I
| had never seen New England or Hampden College until I was
| nineteen. I am a Californian by birth and also, I have recently
| discovered, by nature. The last is something I admit only now,
| after the fact. Not that it matters.
|
| > I grew up in Plano, a small silicon village in the north. No
| sisters, no brothers. My father ran a gas station and my mother
| stayed at home until I got older and times got tighter and she
| went to work, answering phones in the office of one of the big
| chip factories outside San Jose.
|
| > Plano. The word conjures up drive-ins, tract homes, waves of
| heat rising from the blacktop. My years there created for me an
| expendable past, disposable as a plastic cup. Which I suppose
| was a very great gift, in a way. On leaving home I was able to
| fabricate a new and far more satisfying history, full of
| striking, simplistic environmental influences; a colorful past,
| easily accessible to strangers.
|
| > The dazzle of this fictive childhood--full of swimming pools
| and orange groves and dissolute, charming show-biz parents--has
| all but eclipsed the drab original. In fact, when I think about
| my real childhood I am unable to recall much about it at all
| except a sad jumble of objects: the sneakers I wore year-round;
| coloring books and comics from the supermarket and the squashed
| old football I contributed to neighborhood games; little of
| interest, less of beauty. I was quiet, tall for my age, prone
| to freckles. I didn't have many friends but whether this was
| due to choice or circumstance I do not now know. I did well in
| school, it seems, but not exceptionally well; I liked to read--
| Tom Swift, the Tolkien books--but also to watch television,
| which I did plenty of, lying on the carpet of our empty living
| room in the long dull afternoons after school.
|
| _Profoundly_ evocative prose. I really love this book.
| stryan wrote:
| Indeed, "a morbid longing for the picturesque at all costs"
| is a line that's burned into my mind.
| booleandilemma wrote:
| I read it for the first time earlier this year and it's probably
| the best novel I read in 2022. It's one of those books I wish I'd
| discovered years ago.
|
| If anyone else can recommend something like it please let me
| know.
| SL61 wrote:
| Depending on what you liked about The Secret History, you might
| enjoy The Goldfinch from the same author.
|
| It has the same basic concept of wealthy, pretentious young
| adults making bad choices, but it's set in NYC and Las Vegas
| instead of a rural liberal arts college. It's written 20 years
| after TSH and it's quite a bit more polished, for better or
| worse.
| yamtaddle wrote:
| > It has the same basic concept of wealthy, pretentious young
| adults making bad choices, but it's set in NYC and Las Vegas
| instead of a rural liberal arts college.
|
| This (the original, not the Vegas-and-NYC thing) complete
| with the liberal arts college (or New England prep school)
| setting, is practically a little sub-genre all its own. Some
| kind of consequence of a high percentage of people who go on
| to write novels going through the prep-school-to-liberal-
| arts-college path (as Graeber notes in _Bullshit Jobs_ , it's
| a whole lot easier to succeed in most sorts of literary
| careers when you can afford to go years on end with little or
| no pay, early in adulthood) plus write-what-you-know. There
| are tons and tons of books like that, some of them famous and
| others not.
| ubermonkey wrote:
| I have been mildly disappointed by Tartt's follow-up works, but
| even more disappointed by her pace. Since TSH was published in
| 1992, she's written only two other novels:
|
| * _The Little Friend_ , in 2002, which is set in her native
| Mississippi; and
|
| * _The Goldfinch_ , in 2013, which won big prizes (including a
| Pulitzer), but is to my tastes inferior to the other two.
|
| Her once-a-decade pattern suggests another book should be
| coming along any year now, but who can tell?
|
| I mentioned uptopic that mystery writer Tana French included an
| homage to _The Secret History_ in the second book of her
| "Dublin Murder Squad" series. It's worth reading, but I'm not
| sure how "like" Tartt it really is.
|
| What makes French's series interesting is the shifting points
| of view within the same (fictional) Dublin bureau -- the first
| book is from the POV of a given character, and then the second
| shifts to someone who was a supporting character in the first
| book, and so forth.
| hairofadog wrote:
| I've loved this book since it was released. Weirdly, until _The
| Goldfinch_ came out, it was a book that was at once globally
| popular but somehow locally unknown; very few of my acquaintances
| had read it, so I could never talk to anyone about it.
|
| There's a podcast named _Once Upon a Time at Bennington College_
| that I hesitate to recommend because it has a sort of tabloid,
| gossipy vibe to it, but it 's about Bennington College in the
| 80's, where Tartt, Jonathan Lethem, and Bret Easton Ellis were
| contemporaries. I skipped through it, but I found it interesting
| the extent to which the backdrop of _The Secret History_ came
| from Bennington.
|
| https://cadence13.com/once-upon-a-time-at-bennington-college...
|
| I'd also recommend the Tartt-narrated version of the audiobook.
| (I believe there's another version narrated by Robert Sean
| Leonard.)
| irrational wrote:
| > It became the kind of book people read dozens of times and
| excitedly press into the hands of others. Since its publication,
| it has sold more than 2.3 million print copies in English alone
| and been published in 40 languages. Thirty years on, it's still
| in the cultural conversation
|
| It is so strange to me that I, a voracious reader in my 50s, have
| never heard of this book.
| nervousvarun wrote:
| The first time I read the book I was stunned that a debut
| novelist could write such incredibly detailed characters. They
| just jump off the page.
|
| By the second time I had researched Tartt's life (as the
| article says...she's almost Pynchon-esque in that she doesn't
| reveal much in public) and knew that it was based on actual
| people she had known in college (with Tartt herself as the
| gender-swapped protagonist).
|
| By the third time I didn't care anymore and just read it
| because it's such a unique experience. As someone else said
| upstream it's not a murder mystery...it's a character study
| that happens to have murders.
|
| The absolute best time to read this would be around 16-24 or
| so...but it would be interesting to hear the perspective of a
| first time reader at your age.
| cgh wrote:
| Exactly, I read it right around when I was finishing
| university. Because of a large theatre studies department,
| mysterious black-clad, chain-smoking girls stamped from the
| Donna Tartt mould were constantly wafting around the place.
| So this book came along at the right time.
|
| Like a lot of things I enjoyed at that age, I've been
| hesitant to revisit it because I'm afraid it's actually a
| pretentious and self-absorbed product of its time, not unlike
| those theatre students. I have no idea what it would be like
| to experience a book like that as an actual adult.
| quesera wrote:
| > I'm afraid it's actually a pretentious and self-absorbed
| product of its time
|
| This is closer to where I landed, FWIW.
|
| I read John Irving in those critical early 20's years, when
| elite cold-weather academic settings and the quirky
| complicated people that inhabit them was my vida loca. I
| enjoyed his books.
|
| I read _The Secret History_ a decade later, and it felt
| like a very well-written soap opera.
|
| She wrote the book while she was in college, so it would be
| unkind to judge harshly! But it was neither interesting
| enough (OMG these people again?), nor entertaining enough
| (she takes her story pretty seriously), to leave a lasting
| impression on me.
|
| John Irving left me with an indelible memory of a stuffed
| armadillo. And a lesson of what _not_ to do while sitting
| in a car parked in a driveway.
|
| ...
|
| Related recommendations ...
|
| If you enjoy well-written coming-of-age stories set in
| elite cold-weather academia, I think Susan Choi's _My
| Education_ stands up to reading in actual adulthood.
|
| If you like John Irving but have no special affinity for
| the ECWA milieu, Tom Robbins is great fun.
| randomcarbloke wrote:
| Hard disagree, it may be pretentious but Tartt's writing
| is immaculate, one of few first rate contemporary
| authors.
|
| The unflinching and unreliable insight into shared
| delusion and how being caught up in an imagined Greek
| tale distorts reality and perception of humanity.
|
| It truly is a tragedy.
|
| Compare it to the contemporaries it has
| spawned/influenced - all trite genre lit evoking those
| dire theatre kids from college (losers, not pretentious
| in my experience).
| ubermonkey wrote:
| Indeed!
|
| I read it new, but I was in an English department at the time.
|
| (Like a lot of technical-career people my age (52), I have a
| liberal arts degree.)
| yamtaddle wrote:
| Yeah, same, I'm surprised to see all this praise for and
| recognition of it on here--it's pretty rare for me to encounter
| any remotely-literary work on a site as popular and (when it
| comes to literature) mainstream as HN, that I've never even
| heard of. Off on some more book-focused site, sure, wouldn't be
| that weird, but not somewhere like this.
|
| Cool.
| ubermonkey wrote:
| Just a fantastic novel, and a staggering debut.
|
| Fun fact: excellent mystery author Tana French is also a fan, to
| the point that her novel _The Likeness_ includes an extended and
| overt homage to Tartt 's book.
| hairofadog wrote:
| I like French's other work a lot, but I couldn't get past the
| similarities to _The Secret History_ in the _Likeness_. It
| really feels like fan fiction. (There 's nothing wrong with Fan
| Fiction! But I found it distracting.)
| neonate wrote:
| https://archive.ph/2bRjP
|
| http://web.archive.org/web/20221220145037/https://www.bbc.co...
| nervousvarun wrote:
| It is referenced in detail by the article, but want to emphasize
| further if you like this book...I highly recommend the "Once Apon
| A Time At Bennington College" podcast by Lili Anolik.
|
| It really is a deep dive into Donna Tartt and her college
| friends/experience which was the basis for the book. Anolik has
| interviews with former classmates, teachers, etc. Fantastic
| listen.
| hwestiii wrote:
| Awful, awful book. I've finished a lot of bad books, but that one
| was too much.
| ubermonkey wrote:
| Yours is a very unusual opinion, to be sure.
|
| But there's always someone.
| hwestiii wrote:
| I think it is the favorite book of a lot of people who don't
| read a lot. It's a transparent soap opera that flirts with
| incest and skullduggery and a lot of dreck. I don't
| intentionally not finish many books, but that's in the list.
| flenserboy wrote:
| A fantastic book, the sort that lingers with the reader.
| TigeriusKirk wrote:
| One of my favorite books. I have the first edition hardback, a
| paperback, and an ebook version. I just keep buying it for some
| reason.
|
| Made me wish I'd gone to a small liberal arts college just for
| the intensity of the cliques.
|
| And someday I'll actually learn Ancient Greek. Someday.
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