Title: The Secret History
Rating: 4 Stars
This is one of those novels whose background is perhaps more famous than the actual story itself. It’s a story of two murders committed by a group of students studying classics at a small semi-prestigious liberal arts university in Vermont. While there, they fall under the spell of a classics professor.
The reason that the background is somewhat famous is because Donna Tartt, the author, attended Bennington, a small university in Vermont, majoring in classics. While there, she met fellow authors Bret Easton Ellis (famous for Less Than Zero and notorious for American Psycho), Jonathon Lethem (famous for Motherless Brooklyn), and Jill Eisenstadt (writer of a couple of novels and many short stories). Tartt studied classics with Claude Fredericks, a long running and legendary professor at Bennington, who also started a small press that featured innovative writers like Gertrude Stein.
Since at least the milieu appears to be autobiographical, people read the novel hoping to get inside dirt on life at such a small, prestigious liberal-arts institution. This is reminiscent of Jay McInerney’s novel Bright Light, Big City, which was a fictional insider’s look at the somewhat secretive The New Yorker magazine, where McInerney worked as a fact checker.
The story is told from the point of view of Richard Papen, a young man desperate to escape his home in California. With financial aid, he’s just barely able to get into Hampden college. Not sure what to do but having two previous years of Greek under his belt, he tries to get into the classics program. However, the classics program is essentially one professor who takes on a very small number of students. He eventually manages to weasel his way into the program.
Once there, he thinks that he’s in way over his head. The other students appear brilliant. The professor is nontraditional. His sessions seem more like Platonic symposiums than traditional lectures. They open up entire new worlds of ideas to Richard. Although he feels like he’s flailing, Richard is thrilled to be having what appears to be a true liberal arts experience.
Slowly, the layers start to peel away. Although all of his fellow students appear wealthy, that is not the case. Bunny, in particular, steals common food and just assumes that someone will always pay for him. Francis has family wealth but is on an allowance. The twins, Camilla and Charles, rely upon small sums given to them by their grandmother. Henry has a modest trust fund.
One night, in Richard and Bunny’s absence, the other four attempt to recreate a Dionysian bacchanalia. While in a frenzy, Henry accidentally kills a Vermont farmer.
At this point, the novel begins to go down a path similar to Doestevsky’s Crime and Punishment. In Crime and Punishment, with high minded purpose, Raskolnikov murders an elderly pawnbroker and her half-sister Lizaveta. After the murder, Raskolnikov, overcome by guilt, becomes emotionally overwrought and falls apart.
Similarly, after the murder of the farmer, the group falls apart. Bunny discovers the murder and proceeds to blackmail the other four. Charles descends into alcoholism. Francis becomes emotionally unstable to the point of near hysterics.
In all of this, Henry appears steadfast. He becomes worried that Bunny is going to bleed all of them dry. After an abortive attempt at a new start in a different country, Henry becomes convinced that the only solution is to murder Bunny. After they successfully murder Bunny, the group decomposes even further as local police and federal agents descend in a search to find Bunny’s body.
Before this is all is over, there is another attempted murder, a suicide, and a hospitalization. All pretense to higher learning or attempts to live by ancient aesthetics have been abandoned. The professor abandons the students. Only one of the six students even graduates. In the last where are they now chapter, it appears that no one is happy.
If Hampden is indeed a stand-in for Bennington, it’s fair to say that Bennington does not come out looking good. The student body is awash in alcohol and drugs. It’s a school where wealthy parents send their misfit children that can’t succeed anywhere else. Two of the biggest problem students are both children of wealthy patrons. They continue attending without consequences, regardless of their behavior.
The Secret History is the inspiration for a literary genre known as dark academia. It contrasts the image of these wonderfully austere places of higher learnings with their classical ideals and gothic buildings with the dark rot that lies underneath them.
I enjoyed reading it. For those of us who attended a university that had similar aspirations, especially in the time in which this was set (the mid 80s), we can probably relate both to the setting as well as the actual reality of attending such an institution.
dorkenstein 