Short Reviews

Tartt's voice is unlike that of any of her contemporaries. Her beautiful language, intricate plotting, fascinating characters, and intellectual energy make her debut by far the most interesting work yet from her generation.

The great pleasure of the novel is the wonderful complexity and the remarkable skill with which this first novelist spins the tale. And a gruesome tale it is... A great, dense, disturbing story, wonderfully told.

Donna Tartt has a real shot at becoming her generation's Edgar Allen Poe... The Secret History pulses like a telltale heart on steroids.

One of the best American college novels to come along since John Knowles's A Seperate Peace...

Imagine a literary gumbo with Dostoevski and Ruth Rendell for stock ingredients and Evelyn Waugh, Dickens, G.B. Shaw, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Shakespeare, and Meyer Levin's 1956 novel Compulsion added for seasoning, and you'll have a pretty good idea of the content and flavor of The Secret History... Immensely entertaining.

The Secret History implicates the reader in a conspiracy which begins in bucolic enchantment and ends exactly where it must - though a less gifted or fearless writer would never have been able to imagine such a rich skein of consequence, Donna Tartt has written a mesmerizing and powerful novel.

A beautifully written story, well-told, funny, sad, scary, and impossible to leave alone until I finished... What a debut!

This well-written first novel attempts to be several things: a psychological suspense thriller, a satire of collegiate mores and popular culture, and a philosophical bildungsroman.

Supposedly brilliant students at a posh Vermont school (Bennington in thin disguise) are involved in two murders, one supposedly accidental and one deliberate.

The book's many allusions, both literary and classical (the students are all classics majors studying with a professor described as both a genius and a deity) fail to provide the deeper resonance
of such works as Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose.

Ultimately, it works best as a psychological thriller.

Expect prepublication hype to generate interest in this book and buy accordingly.

Donna Tartt is clearly a gifted writer...

The cadence of her sentences, the authority with which she shaped 500-plus pages of an erudite page-turner indicate she has the ability to leave her literary contemporaries standing in the road...

The decision to murder has about it the inevitability of classical Greek tragedy.

This is an elaborately conceived and artistically ambitious thriller that turns not on the quest for tenure or pills, but on such matters as 'sin unpunished, innocence destroyed, and evil passing itself as good.' ... Tartt records the aftereffects of unpunished crime with great skill. But her efforts to transform a chronicle of suspense into a study in sensibility are less successful.

Dostoyevskian turmoil does not relocate easily to contemporary Vermont, and the stage-props of ancient Greece don't make the trip any smoother...

Tartt offers the aroma of decadence, not its anatomy; stylish intimations of misbehavior, not visions of hell.

She leaves her hero hanging out at the abyss, admiring his new sneakers.

A thinking-person's thriller...

Think of Lord of the Flies, then The Rules of Attraction...

The Secret History combines a bit of both - the unmistakable whiff of evil from William Golding's classis and the mad recklessness of privileged youth from Bret Easton Ellis's novel of the '80s...

As stony and chilling as any Greek tragedian ever plumbed.

Powerful...Enthralling...A ferociously well-paced entertainment.

This is a work of occasionally irritating pretension that is mostly redeemed by its simple virtue as a gripping read...

Seemingly determined to upset the well-established conventions of the academic novel...

Ms. Tartt has nonetheless managed to retain the best features of the genre.

Foremost among them is her skillful investigation of the chasm between academe's supposed ideals and the vagaries of its actual behavior...

{The novel} is at its best when it keeps its narrative feet firmly planted on the stage floor of its characters' lives.

Where it parts company with even the best of its campus colleagues is in the clever evolution of its first-person telling, its many magnificent pages of description and its refusal to let the parochial environs of its setting limit the exploration of its characters.

Richard Papen arrived at Hampden College in New England and was quickly seduced by an elite group of five students, all Greek scholars, all worldly, self-assured, and, at first glance, all highly unapproachable.

As Richard is drawn into their inner circle, he learns a terrifying secret that binds them to one another...a secret about an incident in the woods in the dead of night where an ancient rite was brought to brutal life...and led to a gruesome death. And that was just the beginning....

The pages beg to be turned...

Tells you whodunit on the first page and makes you read on hungrily to discover the how and why.

A long tale of friendship, arrogance, and murder knit together with the finesse that many writers will never have...
Her writing bewitches us...

The Secret History is a wonderfully beguiling book, a journey backward to the fierce and heady friendships of our school days, when all of us believed in our power to conjure up divinity and to be forgiven any sin.

What Donna Tartt has attempted - and largely brought off - is a challenging combination of a mystery..., 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.

A challenging combination of mystery, an exploration of evil, both banal and bizarre, and a generous slice of the world as seen by the author...

A smart, craftsman-like, viscerally compelling novel.

An accomplished psychological killer... Absolutely chilling... Tartt has a stunning command of the lyrical.

The Secret History is a grand read - an artful blend of intelligence, entertainment, and suspense that quickens the pulse.

Beautifully written, suspenseful from start to finish.

Donna Tartt has invested this simple and suspenseful plot with a considerable amount of atmosphere and philosophical significance...
She's a very good writer indeed.

Online Reviews

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The Secret History Donna Tartt audio cassette

The Little Friend Donna Tartt audio cd (abridged) audio cassette (unabridged)

Donna Tartt's The Secret History: A Reader's Guide Tracy Hargreaves

Best of the Oxford American: Ten Years from the Southern Magazine of Good Writing edited by Mark Smirnoff

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