Laith
I nearly abandoned The Secret History after its opening pages. This isn't my genre, but the pacing felt glacial, the setup endless, and I found myself questioning whether Donna Tartt’s literary darling deserved the praise it has continued to receive. Had I truly dropped this book where I wanted to, it would have been entirely my loss. What emerges after the first 1/4 is a novel that envelops you so completely that the fictional world becomes more vivid than your actual surroundings.
The story follows Richard Papen, a working-class California transplant who becomes obsessed with an elite group of classics students at the prestigious Hampden College in Vermont. Under the exclusive tutelage of the charismatic Professor Julian Morrow, students Henry Winter, Bunny Corcoran, Francis Abernathy, and twins Charles and Camilla Macaulay have formed their own insular circle which Richard seeks desperately to join. But these students aren't all that they appear to be, and the story opens on their murder of Bunny. The novel unfolds backwards from this revelation.
The atmosphere is what everyone comments on, and for good reason, it’s so complete that Hampden College functions as its own character, brought to life through Tartt’s masterful voice. This isn’t accidental. The Hampden of the novel is the Bennington of reality, where Tartt attended college, and it’s astounding how much of that real place saturates these pages. From the campus rendering to the characters themselves, Tartt has created a time capsule. Through interviews with Tartt’s classmates and contemporaries, we learn that many of her central characters—Bunny, Henry, and especially the enigmatic Julian—are based on real people who dressed, talked, and embodied the very personas that populate her fiction.
(I didn't know any of this off the top of my head either, I have to plug the "Once upon a time... at Bennington" podcast, it's over 15 hours of interviews and discussion of Donna Tartt and the rest of the literary brat pack who attended Bennington during the 80s. If you loved the book I highly recommend this podcast)
This preservation extends beyond simple character work into something more profound. Tartt was documenting a campus that was genuinely atypical: Bennington had no tests or grades, and their professors weren’t just teachers but actual practitioners of their arts. The mythical culture of collegiate excess, of cafe-culture elites rubbing shoulders with the working class, it's a lived experience that Tartt brings completely to life, one that echoes in other works of the era, ironically best observed in "Animal House" - one that doesn’t exist anymore, nor in the specific case of Hampden did it ever exist outside of Bennington. It's into this novel atmosphere that Tartt injects an Oxfordian air into her classics students (one the originals truly did possess) that had already ceased to exist by the time she was writing, creating a vision of intellectual campus life that has fundamentally changed our cultural perception of what college should be and look like.
This cultural impact became especially pronounced during the COVID lock-down, when The Secret History experienced a remarkable resurgence in popularity. An entire generation of incoming freshmen, forced to remain indoors and learn online, absorbed Tartt’s mythological Hampden into their psyche. Her scholarly atmosphere tinged with youthful excess became the imagery of their college daydream, possibly reinforcing the educational priority and purpose of higher education. Whether this influence proves positive or negative remains to be seen, if the Hampden vibe is what students now crave it's up to them to cultivate it. The expectations Hampden sets are certainly unrealistic, colleges are not the free-wheeling intellectual cradles we all wished them to be, but a few disappointed freshmen doesn’t constitute a educational crisis. Honestly, knowing as much as I do about the real Bennington of the 1980s makes me long for such a place — a college designed for people whom the standard scholastic mold simply didn’t fit.
The Secret History continues to have its moment in the sun, inspiring hordes of imitators in what we now call “dark academia.” Recent works like M.L. Rio’s "If We Were Villains", R.F. Kuang’s "Babel", and Olivie Blake’s "The Atlas Six" all bear Tartt’s influence to some degree, a testament to the enduring power of her vision.
The book’s literary merit is also undeniable. Say what you will about Donna Tartt, but you must admit she’s a gifted writer. Her prose is simply untouchable. Consider lines like “Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it,” or her luminous descriptions of Vermont: “The mountains looked lavender in the setting sun, and the snow looked lavender, too, piled up in great soft slopes and drifts.” She demonstrates remarkable skill in blending registers, classical allusions flowing seamlessly into contemporary dialogue and observation.
More sophisticated still is her adoption of the tragic structure of The Bacchae, modernizing it by adapting its themes not just as part of the narrative but mirrored right down to the anachronism of her characters. These Oxfordian students ensconced within a facsimile of the most non-traditional college of its time create multiple layers of temporal displacement that mirror the classical tragic form.
Does this book break one of my biggest rules with its terribly slow opening? Yes, in fact it loses a whole star for it. But here’s my final advice: stopping before page 170 would be doing all the hard labor for none of the reward. Take that slow opening in bits and chunks, don’t try to power through it in marathon sessions. I’ve come to realize that the job of those deliberate early pages is to lure you into the universe, to have you inhabit Hampden alongside these characters. Once that world has you in its grip, you’ll understand why this book has shaped a generation’s vision of what collegiate life can be, even if such a place exists now only in our collective imagination.
I nearly abandoned The Secret History after its opening pages. This isn't my genre, but the pacing felt glacial, the setup endless, and I found myself questioning whether Donna Tartt’s literary darling deserved the praise it has continued to receive. Had I truly dropped this book where I wanted to, it would have been entirely my loss. What emerges after the first 1/4 is a novel that envelops you so completely that the fictional world becomes more vivid than your actual surroundings.
The story follows Richard Papen, a working-class California transplant who becomes obsessed with an elite group of classics students at the prestigious Hampden College in Vermont. Under the exclusive tutelage of the charismatic Professor Julian Morrow, students Henry Winter, Bunny Corcoran, Francis Abernathy, and twins Charles and Camilla Macaulay have formed their own insular circle which Richard seeks desperately to join. But these students aren't all that they appear to be, and the story opens on their murder of Bunny. The novel unfolds backwards from this revelation.
The atmosphere is what everyone comments on, and for good reason, it’s so complete that Hampden College functions as its own character, brought to life through Tartt’s masterful voice. This isn’t accidental. The Hampden of the novel is the Bennington of reality, where Tartt attended college, and it’s astounding how much of that real place saturates these pages. From the campus rendering to the characters themselves, Tartt has created a time capsule. Through interviews with Tartt’s classmates and contemporaries, we learn that many of her central characters—Bunny, Henry, and especially the enigmatic Julian—are based on real people who dressed, talked, and embodied the very personas that populate her fiction.
(I didn't know any of this off the top of my head either, I have to plug the "Once upon a time... at Bennington" podcast, it's over 15 hours of interviews and discussion of Donna Tartt and the rest of the literary brat pack who attended Bennington during the 80s. If you loved the book I highly recommend this podcast)
This preservation extends beyond simple character work into something more profound. Tartt was documenting a campus that was genuinely atypical: Bennington had no tests or grades, and their professors weren’t just teachers but actual practitioners of their arts. The mythical culture of collegiate excess, of cafe-culture elites rubbing shoulders with the working class, it's a lived experience that Tartt brings completely to life, one that echoes in other works of the era, ironically best observed in "Animal House" - one that doesn’t exist anymore, nor in the specific case of Hampden did it ever exist outside of Bennington. It's into this novel atmosphere that Tartt injects an Oxfordian air into her classics students (one the originals truly did possess) that had already ceased to exist by the time she was writing, creating a vision of intellectual campus life that has fundamentally changed our cultural perception of what college should be and look like.
This cultural impact became especially pronounced during the COVID lock-down, when The Secret History experienced a remarkable resurgence in popularity. An entire generation of incoming freshmen, forced to remain indoors and learn online, absorbed Tartt’s mythological Hampden into their psyche. Her scholarly atmosphere tinged with youthful excess became the imagery of their college daydream, possibly reinforcing the educational priority and purpose of higher education. Whether this influence proves positive or negative remains to be seen, if the Hampden vibe is what students now crave it's up to them to cultivate it. The expectations Hampden sets are certainly unrealistic, colleges are not the free-wheeling intellectual cradles we all wished them to be, but a few disappointed freshmen doesn’t constitute a educational crisis. Honestly, knowing as much as I do about the real Bennington of the 1980s makes me long for such a place — a college designed for people whom the standard scholastic mold simply didn’t fit.
The Secret History continues to have its moment in the sun, inspiring hordes of imitators in what we now call “dark academia.” Recent works like M.L. Rio’s "If We Were Villains", R.F. Kuang’s "Babel", and Olivie Blake’s "The Atlas Six" all bear Tartt’s influence to some degree, a testament to the enduring power of her vision.
The book’s literary merit is also undeniable. Say what you will about Donna Tartt, but you must admit she’s a gifted writer. Her prose is simply untouchable. Consider lines like “Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it,” or her luminous descriptions of Vermont: “The mountains looked lavender in the setting sun, and the snow looked lavender, too, piled up in great soft slopes and drifts.” She demonstrates remarkable skill in blending registers, classical allusions flowing seamlessly into contemporary dialogue and observation.
More sophisticated still is her adoption of the tragic structure of The Bacchae, modernizing it by adapting its themes not just as part of the narrative but mirrored right down to the anachronism of her characters. These Oxfordian students ensconced within a facsimile of the most non-traditional college of its time create multiple layers of temporal displacement that mirror the classical tragic form.
Does this book break one of my biggest rules with its terribly slow opening? Yes, in fact it loses a whole star for it. But here’s my final advice: stopping before page 170 would be doing all the hard labor for none of the reward. Take that slow opening in bits and chunks, don’t try to power through it in marathon sessions. I’ve come to realize that the job of those deliberate early pages is to lure you into the universe, to have you inhabit Hampden alongside these characters. Once that world has you in its grip, you’ll understand why this book has shaped a generation’s vision of what collegiate life can be, even if such a place exists now only in our collective imagination.