The Secret History, Donna Tartt

The Secret History by Donna Tartt is a book I picked up at the Labor Day Festival.  I enjoyed The Goldfinch.

Started: 5/26/2020

Completed: 6/1/2020

Recommendation: Mild Recommendation

Recommended By: Nobody

Words for which I sought help:

bilious -- affected or associated with nausea or vomiting

chiton -- The chiton was a simple tunic garment of lighter linen and usually pleated that was worn by both sexes and all ages. It consisted of a wide, rectangular tube of material secured along the shoulders and lower arms by a series of fasteners. Chitons typically fell to the ankles of the wearer, but shorter chitons were sometimes worn during vigorous activities by athletes, warriors or slaves.

exegesis -- critical explanation or interpretation of a text, especially of scripture

Review:

This book is an odd mix between a coming of age story and a mystery.  There is an immense amount of drama but the drama makes sense given the context.  It is about young people maturing under huge pressure.  As the pressure grows, the weather seems to change with huge swings and, itself, generates complications.  School, oddly, plays a small role, but serves as a structure for the whole story providing a framework for keeping track of time.

It is also interesting how important pay phones are to the story.  I wonder how well this concept of a pay phone will last as the book ages.  It seems like the current generation is having a hard time imagining a time without connectivity and the lack of knowledge of each other and outside world (see through the lens of pay phones and the occasional television references suggest that it might be hard to generations increasingly removed from this story to understand how the misunderstandings in location and time (both leveraged and unleveraged) might somehow exist.

The book is rich in characters (some of whom are simply unpursued).  The sense of this being a story (as told in some kind of 1950s novel or as in a movie) that is aware of itself leads to a disconcerting effort to "tie things up" while leaving plenty of areas incomplete--thus, the book becomes a sort of claim to completion without really being complete at all.