Book Review: The Secret History

In the early hours of 2020, blissfully optimistic, I set out to read one book a month. As the goings of quarantine waxed and waned and as the beginning of the school year came, first into view, and then into startling focus, I was reminded why I had, in years past, been unable to successfully complete a year’s worth of reading as I had intended. That being said, as August came to a close and my reading list for the year sat at around seven books finished, I was most determined to not only finish this latest read, but to linger upon its every word. I decided to read Donna Tartt’s The Secret History after I read her more recent novel, The Goldfinch earlier this year, and I’m so glad I did. Where the books differ in almost every way: plot, pace, setting, character development, and conclusion, they shared one subtle but wholly significant undertone, that of profound philosophical reverence. In The Goldfinch, this played a role primarily in the book’s conclusion, with the last five pages unraveling moral reasoning like a spool of yarn that’s been dropped off of a cliff and which served as the context according to which the first 970 pages could be understood. However, in The Secret History philosophy played the part of a secondary character, the type who you come to realize, only in the end, was pulling the strings that made the main characters act in unusual and yet highly specific ways the whole time. The Secret History tells of the complex inner workings of a highbrow Greek class taught at a small private college in New England. The class is exclusive in nature and made so deliberately by its professor, Julian, whose past boasts celebrity dinner parties and extensive travels abroad. The students, of which there are only six, come from starkly different backgrounds themselves and are nonetheless inexplicably intertwined with one another. Henry is the only child of distant and extremely wealthy parents, who is the silent, but unquestioned leader of the group because he is also by far the smartest. Richard, whose life the novel tracks most closely, leaves behind his rather neglectful parents in Plano, California in the hopes of reinventing himself. The twins, orphaned at a young age, have a closeness between them specific to twins orphaned at a young age. Francis is loyal and honest with everyone besides himself. And Bunny, who comes from nearly nothing but acts as if he comes from much, carries himself with a certain confidence that masks his insecurities. It is their shared veneration for the classic Greek and Roman ideals which they study is so commanding, that, only in hindsight, may the story’s conclusion be seen as inevitable. As the eclectic and still harmonious group of six increasingly cut themselves off from the rest of campus, they form their own little secret society inspired by the ancient texts they study. Particularly, they become obsessed with Julian’s recounting of the Dionysian bacchanal — the orgiastic, hedonistic, drug-fueled rituals resulting in the dissolution of the ego — that the Greeks used to participate in. The group ends up successfully performing a Bacchanalian rite, shedding their rational minds in a quiet corner of the Vermont countryside. But trouble arises when, in their haze, someone in the group accidentally murders a local man and the group must collectively bear the psychological weight of murder, under which their bond begins to crumble.

Favorite Quotes:

“It's a very Greek idea, and a very profound one. Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it. And what could be more terrifying and beautiful, to souls like the Greeks or our own, than to lose control completely? To throw off the chains of being for an instant, to shatter the accident of our mortal selves? We don't like to admit it, but the idea of losing control is one that fascinates controlled people such as ourselves more than anything. All truly civilized people - the ancients no less than us - have civilized themselves through the willful repression of the old, animal self. Are we, in this room, really very different from the Greeks and the Romans? Obsessed with duty, piety, loyalty, sacrifice? All those things which are to modern tastes so chilling?”

“Forgive me, for all the things I did but mostly for the ones that I did not.”

“ It is a terrible thing to learn as a child that one is a being separate from the world, that no one and no thing hurts along with one's burned tongues and skinned knees, that one's aches and pains are all one’s own. Even more terrible, as we grow old, to learn that no person, no matter how beloved, can ever truly understand us. Our own selves make us most unhappy, and that's why we're so anxious to lose them.”

How Long Did it Take to Read it:

About a month. The pace at which I read the book ebbed and flowed to the pace at which the story moved. The beginning of the book took me much longer to get through than the middle, and there was a part toward the end where I almost gave up. However, the story never did come to a stand still, it always keeps moving, and as such, I kept reading. Worth sticking it out.

Where I Read:

Mostly outside at coffee shops once they began, slowly and then all at once, re-opening. Or stretched out on the futon couch in my college apartment.

Thoughts:

This is the perfect book to read at the beginning of a new school year as the close-knit, intellectual group at the center of The Secret History is in many ways the college ideal. However, as things fall apart for the students at Hampden College in a uniquely dark way, the book still moves along to the soft hum of the mainstream college experience we all come to know: parties and awkward exchanges in dorm bathrooms, late night studying and conversations about future plans. Central to the story, and arguably to the college experience itself, is the nature of relationships, their comings about and the qualities that make them enduring. However, as slow relationship building—the exchange of thoughts and stories, shared experiences—is replaced by feelings of obligation and blind loyalty, Tartt puts into perspective how lonely college can be, and what a person must sacrifice to feel embedded in a college’s social fabric.