![]() (I also think there's something very interesting in the class dynamics here. ![]() To find meaning, one must leave Hampden behind - for it was never intended that what happened there should be lived by as example. Even if that means leaving Hampden behind."Īnd I would agree. ![]() The Gawker piece quotes a Tartt essay in which she writes, “'Something in the spirit longs for meaning - longs to believe in a world order where nothing is purposeless, where character is more than chemistry, and people are something more than a random chaos of molecules,'” and in this vein concludes, "To take Tartt the essayist seriously is to wager on that meaning. Quite the opposite - it is a book about what makes life meaningful by showing us what meaning is not. The Secret History is not a nihilistic book because its characters' behaviors result in no meaning. We know that life's beauty lies not in pleasure without regard for others, in the fulfillment of selfish desires, but in case we get confused, Donna Tartt shows us that a life lived by those guidelines leads to irrevocably damaged relationships, unfading pain, and death. Our merry band of classics fetishists may think they are living a life of poetry and meaning, but we, the readers, know they aren't. It was clear to me that The Secret History is not the latter example, but the former. I loved (I thought) exactly what its characters loved: nostalgic emblems of an era imagined as significant."Īs I grow older, I care less for lovely or perfect or nice or even good (in the moral definition of the word) characters, and find myself only wanting to read about the unlikable, the complex, the ones who have something to say on what I shouldn't do, rather than teach me about what I should. To quote the article that inspired the fit of rage that has me typing away, I don't think this is "about all the things loved," while "miss the point of them entirely." At the age of seventeen, they continue, they "wanted (I thought) exactly what its youthful characters wanted: a poetic life, a mythic life, a life shot through with meaning. I don't think you're supposed to relate to them, or to see their story as something that might happen to you if you read too much Greek myth or like pretty things too much. I don't think you're supposed to like these characters, or even think they're very realistic - they are, after all, portraits in hindsight written by someone in the throes of unrequited obsession. ![]() I don't think she condemns an appreciation for the aesthetic, or even a classical scholarship. When I hear this, I don't believe that the point of the story, or what Tartt is trying to tell us, is that a love of beauty is equivalent to an amoral life. When our story ends, our group is decimated, some members dead, some irrevocably changed, all unwilling to return to the story of that fateful year - all except Richard, who is unable to leave it behind. Including, as they indulge in ever-spiraling hedonism, murder. He wants to befriend them, to sleep with them, to live with them, to do everything he can to become them. He arrives at his preppy and prestigious(ish) New England college to slowly become obsessed and then part of the mysterious and selective classics program, a cultlike group of trust fund babies led by an often-overstepping and charismatic professor.Ĭoming from a poor and abusive background, where beauty is nowhere to be found, Richard wants nothing more than to immerse and lose himself in this group of wealthy and charming students. His values are more ideas than ideals - vague and dim reflections of what love, and beauty, and wisdom, concepts he's never known, might feel or look like, rather than what they are. Richard is unhappy, impressionable, desperate. The Secret History follows mainly our narrator, Richard, as he looks back on his time in the classics program of a liberal arts college. I wrote about it vaguely and glowingly, thinking everyone had sort of.gotten the point of the book, already.īut then I read this review in Gawker, so I'm coming back. I said I "loved" its characters, though of course I meant more that I loved them as figures, considering they are unlikable murderers. In my first foray at writing about this (which you can still see below), I focused on the immersion of it. However, there are things that I believe no one should say emerging in real time, and so contributing my likely already-expressed thoughts might counterbalance them, to some degree. My original review of this wasn't much of anything, because I believed (and still kind of do) that everything worth saying about this book has been said.
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