The Secret History by Donna Tartt Review

It’s rare to meet characters who live and breathe this convincingly on the page. It’s even rarer to wish every single one of them would suffocate.

I read The Secret History by Donna Tartt a few months ago for my Classics Club list, and I’ve been putting off writing about it ever since because I couldn’t for the life of me decide if I liked the book or loathed it.

It’s one of those books people speak about with near-reverence, and I was certain it would become a favourite of mine. Plus, Greek mythology, tragic archetypes, power, obsession, and betrayal are all the things I usually gravitate toward and they were all the things this novel promised…

Deep dive on The Secret History (spoiler-free)

The reading experience

Tartt’s prose is nothing short of intoxicating. She captures the intensity and stress of intellectual pursuit in a way that feels both seductive and claustrophobic, and so it’s easy to see why this novel became the blueprint for dark academia.

The book centres heavily on beauty and the cost of chasing it. These students idolise the ancient Greeks, chase transcendence through ritual, and justify extreme violence in the name of self-protection. It’s a fascinating portrayal of how intellectual elitism and the pursuit of beauty can curdle into moral decay, and this is where the novel really shines.

As for the the rest of it… not so much.

Characters

Ahhh, this cast of characters. Or, as I have come to call them, “the very things that kept me from ever enjoying this book even a teensy, tiny bit.”

They are beautiful and terrible and not much else.

Bunny is odious, the kind of person we’ve all met in real life and instantly regretted starting a conversation with. BUT (a big but), at least he felt real and interesting. He had a personality, albeit an extremely insufferable one.

Richard works well as the insecure outsider desperate to belong, and I liked the perspective that gave me on this gilded little world. However, for the last 300 pages, I found his narration bland. To be fair to Richard, the plot in the last half of the book doesn’t give him much to work with but being stuck inside his head for so many pages felt like a form of capital punishment.

Camilla is the only female character of real note. She could have been fascinating, but she wasn’t. She’s less a person than she is an aesthetic and/or prop to give Richard some complexity/goal beyond his desperation to fit in with the classics clique.

Francis’ characterisation is that he’s gay and stylish.

Charles is beautiful and insufferable.

Henry is a big bossy boots with no substance.

Julian, the charismatic classics professor… I read this book only a few months ago and I literally cannot remember a thing about him, or any of the other characters (bar Richard and Bunny) besides what I wrote about them above.

Here’s where I’m going with this: characters make or break a novel for me. I can live with a predictable or meandering (for 300 fricken pages) plot if the characters are magnetic, if I have someone — even it’s a villain — to root for, but The Secret History denied me that.

I didn’t need a hero, but I did need a reason to care about these characters and I just didn’t. They felt one-dimensional and Tartt succeeded too well in making them insufferable.

Before you all get out your pitchforks and/or dox me

I know so many of you loved this book! And I’m truly sorry, I really tried to love it too.

“Why didn’t you just DNF?”, I hear you shouting through your computer screen as you read my review.

Well, I thought something was going to happen at some point. I thought surely in the final 300 pages something is going to happen, but then I got to the final page and… nothing happened. Silly me!

Final verdict

The book was sitting at -2 stars out of 5, -1 star for each character I hated, but Tartt’s prose and her exploration of the books core themes are easily 5 stars.

So, -2 stars + 5 stars = …