5 ms·

The Secret History: A murder mystery that thrills 30 years on

56 points by benbreen 4y ago

flenserboy 4y ago
A fantastic book, the sort that lingers with the reader.
stryan 4y ago
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 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    Indeed, "a morbid longing for the picturesque at all costs" is a line that's burned into my mind.
booleandilemma 4y ago
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 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    > 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 4y ago
  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.
TigeriusKirk 4y ago
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.
irrational 4y ago
> 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.
- ubermonkey 4y ago
  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.)
- nervousvarun 4y ago
  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 4y ago
    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.
nervousvarun 4y ago
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 4y ago
Awful, awful book. I've finished a lot of bad books, but that one was too much.
- ubermonkey 4y ago
  Yours is a very unusual opinion, to be sure. But there's always someone.
  - hwestiii 4y ago
    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.
    - ubermonkey 4y ago
      I literally laughed out loud. There is a sort of person who, when they find they dislike a work nearly universally lauded by professional readers, writers, and editors, wonder what they missed. There is another sort of person who, in the same situation, becomes certain that the praises are in error, that those who sing them must be nitwits, and that they are in possession of the objectively true evaluation of the work. USUALLY I see this trotted out by people who bounce off, say, Faulkner or Joyce, so you're at least interesting for doing it about Tartt. But you're no more correct or insightful for your novel target.
      - hwestiii 4y ago
        By some measure Ayn Rand's "Atlas Shrugged" is the greatest American novel of the 20th century.
hairofadog 4y ago
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/ 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.)
ubermonkey 4y ago
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 4y ago
  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 4y ago
https://archive.ph/2bRjP https://archive.ph/2bRjP http://web.archive.org/web/20221220145037/https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20221020-the-secret-history-a-murder-mystery-that-thrills-30-years-o http://web.archive.org/web/20221220145037/https://www.bbc.co...

56 points by benbreen 4y ago

A fantastic book, the sort that lingers with the reader.

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 4y ago
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 4y ago
  Indeed, "a morbid longing for the picturesque at all costs" is a line that's burned into my mind.

booleandilemma 4y ago

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 4y ago
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 4y ago
  > 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 4y ago
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.

TigeriusKirk 4y ago

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.

irrational 4y ago

> 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.

ubermonkey 4y ago
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.)
nervousvarun 4y ago
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 4y ago
  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.

nervousvarun 4y ago

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 4y ago

Awful, awful book. I've finished a lot of bad books, but that one was too much.

ubermonkey 4y ago
Yours is a very unusual opinion, to be sure. But there's always someone.
- hwestiii 4y ago
  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.
  - ubermonkey 4y ago
    I literally laughed out loud. There is a sort of person who, when they find they dislike a work nearly universally lauded by professional readers, writers, and editors, wonder what they missed. There is another sort of person who, in the same situation, becomes certain that the praises are in error, that those who sing them must be nitwits, and that they are in possession of the objectively true evaluation of the work. USUALLY I see this trotted out by people who bounce off, say, Faulkner or Joyce, so you're at least interesting for doing it about Tartt. But you're no more correct or insightful for your novel target.
    - hwestiii 4y ago
      By some measure Ayn Rand's "Atlas Shrugged" is the greatest American novel of the 20th century.

hairofadog 4y ago

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/ 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.)

ubermonkey 4y ago

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 4y ago
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 4y ago

https://archive.ph/2bRjP https://archive.ph/2bRjP http://web.archive.org/web/20221220145037/https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20221020-the-secret-history-a-murder-mystery-that-thrills-30-years-o http://web.archive.org/web/20221220145037/https://www.bbc.co...