Donna Tartt’s The Secret History is rambling and unforgettable story. Her most widely acclaimed novel, The Secret History tell the powerful story of a group of clever and eccentric misfits who under the influence of their charismatic clas n sics professor discover a new way of thinking and living that is a world away from the humdrum existence of their contemporaries. Delving into themes of guilt, isolation, and manipulation, Tartt explores the link between beauty and terror as well as how truly hard it can be to live and how easy it can be to kill.  

Whenever someone asks me to recommend a book, I always start with the same question: Have you read The Secret History? A lot of people have — the book has been translated into 24 languages and sold over 5 million copies since it was first published in 1992 — but for those lucky (or unlucky) people who have not yet been initiated into the cult of Donna Tartt, there’s never a bad time to get started. The Secret History follows a group of wealthy students at a liberal-arts college in 1980s Vermont, who study ancient Greek with a classics professor named Julian Morrow, an enigmatic eccentric who begins his classes with lines like, “I hope we’re all ready to leave the phenomenal world and enter into the sublime.” Our narrator is the Nick Carraway–esque  Richard Papen, a working-class California boy burdened by a “tragic flaw” which he claims is “a morbid longing for the picturesque at all costs.” Richard arrives at the school on a scholarship, and immediately becomes captivated by the sophistication and seemingly limitless disposable income of his classmates, fabricating a more glamorous past for himself to fit into their clique. Somehow, the reader feels just as desperate for their approval even after knowing them only for 20 pages and ends up yearning for what would seem like an awful way of life to any outsider and even themselves before delving into this narcotic of a book. 

On many occasions, Julian presents the idea of a Bacchae to his students, essentially a huge party where people get drunk and do various other activities to achieve some sort of transcendent, spiritual experience. His students actually– not just theoretically– carry this out, and, in the process, end up unknowingly murdering a farmer. One thing leads to another, and before they know it, they are on a bewitching, mesmerizing path into evil. The fatal flaws of these characters, I think, is that they fail to draw the line between the beautiful and the good. Often, the conflation of morality and beauty can lead to disastrous consequences. Things that are irreverent, crude, hurtful, don’t seem so bad because they appeal to our senses or pleasures. The murders these characters end up committing done out of a love for beauty– they yearned for the picturesque, longed to be part of the tragedies and dramas they read about in their Greek class.  

The novelist's first trick is also her best: in a prologue, her narrator, Richard Pappin, tells us of the murder of Bunny, a crime “for which I was partly responsible.” He appears to have got away with it, and yet to be haunted by it, almost a decade later: “This is the only story I will ever be able to tell.” We will have to read on to find out how he could have done such a thing. “Coleridge said that ‘Shakespeare always made apprehension predominate over surprise,’ and this is what Donna Tartt does.”  

Tartt’s greatest gift does end up being bringing the reader completely into the psychological and intellectual world of our characters, so we never scoff at or question the idea that a group of young scholars might be compelled to commit murder because they got too into their Classics homework. As another Donna Tartt enthusiast put it: “The gang’s horrific crime and their subsequent inexorable decline, which feels as inevitable as a Greek tragedy, never feels silly or contrived but entirely plausible.” She ends up being our own Julian Morrow.