Beauty and the Beast

The Secret History

By Donna Tartt

You are hooked from the first page. How can you not be? The narrator is confessing to a murder. So you know it’s not a whodunit (you know who the murderer is, don’t you?); yet it has all the thrill and intrigue of one. The dream-like, sensory world absorbs you, leaving you so enthralled that you have to drag yourself away to the real one. And everything there is suddenly a pale shadowy version of the one in the book. It’s like a drug-addled brain is being weaned away from the narcotics it so craves.

Okay, I exaggerate. But just a bit, really.

Richard Papen is a small town California boy who lands up in Hampden College in Vermont. The college is all that he has dreamed of - shockingly pretty, East-coast intellectual, as far removed from his mediocre, middle class Californian hometown as it’s possible to be. Richard is Jay Gatsby - completely smitten by the Ivy league-like glamour.  

He falls into the company of a group of five students who take Greek and classical studies as their major - Henry the rich intellectual genius and the de facto leader, the twins Charles and Camilla, Francis with the trust fund and Bunny, the bluff and hearty bigot. Richard passes some sort of informal test and joins them, studying under an eccentric professor - Julian Morrow, who has handpicked these six students. Richard is enamoured by this group, completely sold on their cool intellectual snobbery and does all he can to belong. Their world is that of ancient Greece; the modern one has little meaning and significance. “Pur: that one word contains for me the secret, the bright, terrible clarity of ancient Greek. How can I make you see it, this strange harsh light which pervades Homer’s landscapes and illumines the dialogues of Plato, an alien light, inarticulable in our common tongue?” It truly is an alien land, filled with beauty that is unafraid to be harsh; that allows for Dionysian rituals, ecstatic and intoxicating, even as it appeals to cold, logical reason. “We don’t like to admit it,” said Julian, “but the idea of losing control is one that fascinates controlled people such as ourselves more than almost anything. All truly civilized people - the ancients no less than us - have civilized themselves through the wilful repression of the old, animal self.” This exploration of the animal self, the recreating of ancient rituals, collides with the modern world - and a man is killed. What this murder does to the six friends, how it affects each of them in different ways and the repercussions of it on their friendship forms the rest of the book.

There is something truly macabre and Gothic about the whole story, which is in essence an anatomy of a murder (or two). It calls to mind Bret Easton Ellis’ American Psycho, even if it never matches that book’s gruesomeness. What lifts it from mere horror though is the vein of beauty that runs through it. Tartt’s descriptions of the landscapes, the atmosphere, even the drug-infused mental maps of the students are almost lyrical. I think of Rossetti’s drawings and poetry, of Poe, of the paintings of Georgia O’Keeffe. “..that cavern of a room, with vaulted ceilings and a fire crackling in the fireplace, our faces luminous somehow, and ghostly pale. The firelight magnified our shadows, glinted off the silver, flickered high upon the walls; its reflection roared orange in the windowpanes as if a city were burning outside. The whoosh of the flames was like a flock of birds, trapped and beating in a whirlwind near the ceiling…. Julian, at the head of the long table, rises to his feet and lifts his wineglass. “Live forever,” he says…” Or, Henry describing the effect of an ancient ritual to Richard - “ Wolves howling around us and a bull bellowing in the dark. The river ran white. It was like a film in fast motion, the moon waxing and waning, clouds rushing across the sky. Vines grew from the ground so fast they twined up the trees like snakes; seasons passing in the wink of an eye, entire years for all I know…”

You are stunned by the beauty. And somehow the horror is part of the beauty. By the end of the book, you realize the truth of what Richard says right at the beginning - “ Does such a thing as ‘the fatal flaw’, that showy dark crack running down the middle of a life, exist outside literature? I used to think it didn’t. Now I think it does. And I think mine is this: a morbid longing for the picturesque at all costs.” And you know as a reader, you share that fatal flaw with Richard. Because you are ready to forgive the horror; as long as you can see the picturesque-ness of it.

The Secret History is supposed to be a cult book. I did not come into it, knowing that. But I can now understand how it became one. There is something very adolescent about it - the sort of book that as a young college student, you would worship. The intellectual references, the aesthetic atmospherics, the drug-induced hallucinations. As an adult too, you can feel the power. It took a while, after I finished reading it, to cast aside the spell.

All is Well

The Goldfinch

By Donna Tartt

Theo Decker is grief stricken. He loses his mother, in a bomb blast in a New York museum, and with her he loses that ‘daily, commonplace happiness’ he rarely finds again in his life. But as he loses his mother, he gains a 17th century painting - Carel Fabritius’ The Goldfinch. A dying old man entrusts this painting, saved from the blast, to the thirteen year old’s safekeeping. But Theo, for reasons unknown to even himself (perhaps it is the last remnant of his mother’s life, perhaps he just couldn’t let go of such beauty) keeps it to himself. He moves cities and homes, but the painting accompanies him, occupying a corner of his mind that provides him joy and wonder, even as life around him turns upside down.

Theo carries his painting and his grief with him through a temporary home with his school friend Andy’s family in New York, through Las Vegas where his gambler and alcoholic father takes him, through New York again, this time with Hobie, the dying old man’s business partner in an antique furniture business. There are unforgettable characters in all of these places. Andy’s distant mother, Mrs. Barbour, who gives Theo the closest semblance of parenthood after his mother’s death; his own father, addicted and so completely self-absorbed that even Theo, desperate for a parent figure, can see through every single selfish act of his; and Hobie, a bumbling, giant of a man, living through grief himself, spending his time in his shop’s basement, polishing and restoring lovely pieces of furniture, creating beauty and providing Theo with a career, a home and a desperately missing father-figure. And then there is Boris. Glorious, unfettered Boris, Theo’s only friend in Vegas. Speaking Ukrainian and Russian, drinking vodka and popping pills, Boris takes Theo on a ride from which he finds it hard to get off. You know Boris is that terrible influence that is ultimately going to take Theo down with him. But along with the alcohol and the drugs, Boris gives Theo a taste of friendship he has never known before, and of a life lived careless and free, unafraid. It is an addictive closeness, even a destructive one. But each time you feel Theo falling, life drags him back up. First, out of Vegas on the death of his father, into a saner life with Hobie in New York. And then, with destructive Boris back in his life as a grown man, as you feel Theo’s life spiralling beyond control with a lost painting, gangsters and guns, he is once again resurrected, almost miraculously. At the end, you are left with the feeling that however self-destructive Theo turns, there is a beauty and rightness to life that keeps bringing him back to even keel.

It is a wonderful book. Donna Tartt’s writing is beautiful and evocative -  places, feelings and people come alive (“By contrast Hobie lived and wafted like some great sea mammal in his own mild atmosphere, the dark brown of tea stains and tobacco, where every clock in the house said something different and time didn’t actually correspond to the standard measure but instead meandered along at its own sedate tick-tock, obeying the pace of his antique-crowded backwater, far from the factory-built epoxy-glued version of the world.” or describing Mrs. Barbour “when we looked at each other it seemed that the whole past was redefined and brought into focus by this moment, clear as glass, a complexity of stillness that was rainy afternoons in spring, a dark chair in the hallway, the light-as-air touch of her hand on the back of my head.”). Tartt has created one of those grand narratives - with outsized characters and plots - but which in the end is a hopeful story. A story that says however wicked the world can get, in the end, all will be well.