The Secret History

National Review, Oct 5, 1992 by David Branyan

The Secret History, by Donna Tartt (Knopf, 524 pp., $23)

IT IS SELDOM that a first novel hyped years in advance lives up to public expectations, and reasonable people will be sickened by some of the hype Random House, corporate owner of Knopf, has arranged for thIs particular first novel: notably the profile of Miss Tartt in the current Vanity Fair (owned by S.I. Newhouse, who owns Random House), which sets a new in-house record for delirious sycophancy. That said, The Secret History can be compared to some of the better literary suspense novels of recent years. Miss Tartt has borrowed a plot from Henry James's The Ambassadors, and added the sort of intricate suspense you'd hope for from Scott Turow. In the James novel, a provincial courtier from a small New England town, on an errand to Europe, falls under the spell of a group of aesthetes and their role model. The action here is switched to a college in Vermont where Richard Papen, a provincial student from California, falls under the spell of a group of arrogant classics majors and their role model, an eccentric professor. But there's a sinister and delectable twist: Miss Tartt's aesthetes suffer from moral decay of a very modern kind, and Papen must help cover up a murder after a frenzied re-enactment of a Greek cultic ritual. With its gothic atmosphere and classical pagan references, The Secret History makes for irresistible reading. --DAVID BRAYAN