The Secret History

⚖The case for it

Six students, one Greek seminar, a small Vermont college, and a professor who has quietly cut them off from everyone else on campus. Readers report “I felt like I lived inside these pages” and miss the place after finishing. Tartt gives away the outcome on page one and spends the book on how and why, which fans call the best-executed version of that device they know. Underneath sits Apollonian order against Dionysian excess, giving a campus novel the shape of a Greek tragedy. Readers quote the sentences back. “Achingly pretentious, one of the best books I’ve ever read.”

— the honest librarian

✕The case against

The event the first page promises arrives around page 250, leaving three hundred more of the group drinking and circling each other, which readers file as a “guilt-ridden bender with an extra heaping of drama” rather than mounting dread. Francis, Camilla and Charles get described instead of developed. “The professor was almost non-existent,” which undercuts the devotion the whole clique is built on. Richard observes and misses what readers catch. A long digression about stealing migraine pills is the padding everybody names. “Vibes alone do not a novel make.”

— the honest librarian

12h

honest hours

17

sittings