Tartt's Sweet Deal - Esquire, September 1992

When Donna Tartt arrived at Bennington College, she soon realized that her native Mississippi had failed to prepare her for certain facts of northern undergraduate life. "I had never heard of minimalism," she says. On the evidence of her first I novel (eight years in I the making), she's resisted any new tricks. The fleshy, well-formed sentences in The Secret History are closer in feel to the Victorian novelists she grew up on than to present-day mentor Bret Easton Ellis. Lucky for her. Tartt received a $450,000 advance from Knopf, movie deals are steeping, and all of a sudden it seems that no star treatment is too much for an unknown writer who can really write. Without the art, The Secret History might be a little hard to swallow, this five hundred-page tale about a bunch of Benningtonesque classics majors who get mixed up in a homegrown Dionysian ecstasy cult that turns inadvertently murderous. Twice. Passion, then cover-up. "I've been interested in murder ever since I was a girl," the Twenty-eight-year-old Tartt says sweetly. It's no small achievement on Tartt's part that the reader feels, for a guilty second or two, the utter reasonableness of the transgression. "I think everyone has a moment when they could do it," she says.

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