The Secret History by Donna Tartt is not the book I intended to write about this week. I’d checked out three other books from the library that I hoped I could write about. Two didn’t work and one I couldn’t read fast enough, and, if I am being honest, I think I couldn’t read it fast enough because I gave myself the out that if I didn’t finish it, I could write about The Secret History and, ultimately, I wanted to write about The Secret History.
It’s set at the prestigious—but fictional—Hampden College in rural Vermont, where Richard, our narrator, recounts his first year, during which he and his close-knit group of friends murder one of their own. After having transferred from a college near his hometown in California, Richard fights to get accepted into the Hampden classics department, run entirely by one professor, Julian Morrow. Richard becomes the sixth student added to the Classics cult—I mean group—and is slowly, then suddenly, enmeshed in their messy world.
This book is as smart as it is layered. The rich cast of characters includes the non-Classics department Hampden College students who help the audience keep a pulse on the realities of college life as Richard, our fantastically unreliable narrator, hurtles deeper and deeper into the antics of his Classics classmates. Tartt builds tension with smart details and perspective-shifting secrets revealed as our narrator recounts his story. I was continually surprised by the book, and I loved that my surprise was not based on “How could this be?” but instead, “I didn’t think she would actually go there!”
The Secret History is a moody book fit for our current weather. It is credited with a surge in popularity for the “dark academia” literary and aesthetic subgenre which is characterized by nostalgic imaginings of life at older and prestigious higher education institutions, complete with stone buildings, pleated pants, libraries with cathedral ceilings, dark wood desks, etc.
This is an aesthetic intimately familiar to Tartt, who graduated from Bennington College, and one she pokes fun at for over 500 pages. The book does not romanticize the late-night study sessions by candlelight and handwritten letters in blue ink pens. Instead, Tartt, through the young college students in the Classics department and their beloved professor, relentlessly exposes the vacuity of those who work so hard to embody a nostalgia-based aesthetic that they lose all sense of the real world and make tragic decisions as a result. Wait—why does that sound familiar?
The Secret History isn’t a new book. Yet it is amazing how books, especially older ones, can find us at the right moment. For me, this right moment is living in Vermont, thinking of opulence and its lack, of connection and enmeshment, of the propulsive need to identify with something greater, all while sipping hot tea during a rainy fall.
Michaela Lavelle loves people, books, and spaces where those things can come together. She is the Director of the Quechee/Wilder Libraries in Hartford and can be found playing volleyball, taking long walks, or attempting to bake without a recipe when she is not in the stacks.