TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/083192/08319936.000

Text File | 1993-04-08 | 4KB | 91 lines

                                                                                REVIEWS, Page 69

BOOKS

Murder Midst The Ferns


By MARTHA DUFFY

    TITLE: THE SECRET HISTORY
    AUTHOR: Donna Tartt
    PUBLISHER: Knopf; 524 pages; $23

    THE BOTTOM LINE: The novel that has everything: chills,
thrills, campus scandals, literary jokes.


    What are you doing up here? said Bunny, surprised, when he
found the four of us waiting for him.

    Why, looking for new ferns, said Henry.


    Then, with Henry leading the ambush, Bunny's buddies push
him down to his death in a ravine. A quick look round for
dropped keys or glasses. "Everybody got everything?"

    This little shocker is just the beginning of a long,
ambitious first novel by a young Mississippian. The publisher
has ordered up a 75,000-copy first printing. Director Alan
Pakula (Klute, All the President's Men) has bought it for the
movies. What Donna Tartt has attempted -- and largely brought
off -- is a challenging combination of a mystery (will they get
caught or won't they?), an exploration of evil, both banal and
bizarre, and a generous slice of the world as seen by the
author, a brainy graduate of Bennington who has mastered Greek
and English literature and doesn't care who knows it. It all
adds up to confidence verging on bravura.

    The little band of murderous fern seekers are students at
Hampden, a small, very liberal arts college in Vermont. Acute,
cerebral and tasteful to a fault, the group have become acolytes
of an eccentric Greek scholar who demands that what few pupils
he takes study only his curriculum. There is Henry, rich,
seductive, depraved; Francis, a homosexual with a very
convenient house in the nearby hills; Athena-like Camilla and
her twin Charles. Charles drinks too much, but then they all do,
including Bunny, the feckless, unreliable odd man out.

    This cabal is crashed by the narrator, Richard Papen, a
penniless transfer student who had taken some Greek. He is as
close as the book comes to an objective center, but the device
gets shaky because Richard is a facile, silly liar, boasting
about an imaginary family oil well. He will do anything to be
accepted by these sophisticates. Anything.

    What he gradually learns is that four of the five,
excluding Bunny, have already killed, in the course of what they
are pleased to call a Greek bacchanal. A luckless farmer strayed
into the path of their late-night revels, and, chitons aflap,
fueled by booze and drugs, they butchered him. For Charles it
was a doomed awakening of conscience. For Henry it was a
revelation of quite another sort. Before, he explains to the
perpetually horrified Richard, he "lived too much in the mind."
After, "I know that I can do anything that I want."

    Well, there is one necessity on Henry's agenda. Bunny --
the unserious one, the blabbermouth, the buffoon -- begins to
suspect the quartet of the killing in the field. In general
Tartt shows a superior sense of pace, playing off her red
herrings and foreshadowings like an old hand at the suspense
game. The book's only lag occurs in her needlessly elaborate
effort to turn Bunny from a likable pest into someone obnoxious
enough for Richard to want to kill (for the others, fear of
detection is enough). The cause of Bunny's mounting hysteria,
of course, is simple: he is going from suspicion to terror.

    The Secret History offers the zest of the author's energy
and the pleasure of seeing a young mind tackle classic forms.
Is Vermont, or a microcollege, a stand-in for the author's
native South? No, the shaggy, druggy ways of small schools
around the country are sharply, and often humorously, captured
here. But in its large-scale concept and its shell-game view of
plotting, The Secret History distinctly evokes the Southern
tradition.