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Journal Entry 1 by  bookczuk from Charleston, South Carolina USA on Monday, January 01, 2007
 I had a flat tire the other day and took the car to Gerald's to have it patched. While waiting, I crossed the street to a thrift store to find a book to read. Picked this one up, but ended up browsing in the stores on Savannah Highway instead. I have far too big a to-be-read pile so will release this at some point soon, instead. I know I'll stumble upon another copy some day.
Annotation
An impressive debut novel from a new voice in fiction, The Secret History tells of a small circle of friends at an esteemed college in New England, whose studies in Classical Greek lead them to odd rituals, shocking behavior--and murder.
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Journal Entry 4 by GorgeousGlo on Thursday, June 28, 2007
The Little Friend is one of the best books I've ever read. I then became very curious about Donna Tartt, and decided to read her other novel. As i belong to a book club within Second Life, I proposed this as the June selection, much to the chagrin of other members (this is a looooooong book!). Lucky for me, i was stuck inside a plane for 11 hours, and that, plus my dealings with jet lag, helped me finish it in no time.
Just like it happened with The Little Friend, this is not a murder mystery, and it should not be approached as such. The book opens with Bunny already dead. This is, once again, a novel written for the sake of literature, not for the entertainment that the mystery genre generates.
Richard is the narrator. He is the odd-man out in this group. Unlike the rest, he comes from “uncivilized” California, from a struggling blue-collar family. He feels inferior, and goes to some extremes to conceal his background. That self-rejection even percolates Tartt's writing, as when Richard is describing a girl at a party:
“Her voice was brusque with the staccato Californians sometimes affect when they're trying too hard to be from New York, but there was a bright hard edge of that Golden State cheeriness, too”.
“Golden State”? Who speaks like that? I'm going to have to pay attention at the speech of my fellow Californians, although off the top if my head i don't know anyone who would rather be a New Yorker.
Richard's ignorance to dealing with the winter cold in Vermont was also a backhanded slap to his uncouth California ways. Could he have possibly been so dumb?
One odd thing I found about Richard is that his parents were the opposite of doting. In fact, they could not care less about him. Normally when you are an only child, your parents are all over you. What happened there? Anything is possible, but...
Richard is not particularly lovable. He is weak, but he just wants to fit in. But he comes up as the best of the bunch because everyone else is so awful. Henry is just so haughty, Bunny is disgusting, a leech, Francis is so awfully affected, in his mannerisms, his nez-perce, and the twins Charles and Camilla, oh well, what can I say about them? The Greek professor, Julian, was scary, so gentle on the surface, and so cold deep down. So Richard, by comparison, is surely the most genuine of all.
There were some very convenient coincidences to help the story along, like when Charles is passing by a window and someone calls him in and he gets questioned about Bunny's disappearance by the FBI. Another one was the excellent view they all had of the ambulance carrying Bunny's body from the twins' living room window!
This was, overall, not as tightly wrapped at The Little Friend had been, and there was little innate beauty to the characters. However, it is well written and it certainly kept me entertained throughout.
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The Secret History
