Donna Tartt's seminal novel, The Secret History, is the third Tartt novel that I have read. Her stories are gripping and she is so adept at pulling you into a harsh world fueled by drugs as events spiral out of control.Set in bucolic Hampden College in Vermont, Richard Papen is a middle class Californian whose father owns a gas station. By serendipity, he ends up at Hampden College, a private liberal arts college filled with wealthy, privileged students from the northeast.
At Hampden, Richard studies the Classics under the renowned intellectual Julian Morrow who isolates himself and his selective students from the rest of the campus by creating an academically intense program around ancient Greek.
Included in this discriminating group are: twins Charles & Camilla Macaulay, Francis Abernathy, Henry Winter, and Edmund "Bunny" Corcoran.
Tartt captures college life, along with the feeling of invisibility and feelings of eternal friendship, so well. She captures nuances that are accurate and ring true.
As a Bostonian, I appreciate her Boston references of the Oak Room, Marlborough Street, Exeter Street, and little boys in Red Sox baseball caps. Her depiction of the Corcoran family is spot on.
The book begins with the murder of Bunny Corcoran, which seems improbable, but Tartt masterfully plots out events that lead up to the murder and more grippingly, events that follow. Like her other novels, I could barely stop reading as I became more wrapped up with the characters.
