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Notes -
I recently reread this book after first reading it in either late in secondary school or early in my undergrad. I enjoyed it even more than when I first read it: the atmosphere is impeccable, the characters are so vividly drawn, it's extraordinarily readable even when nothing is really happening plot-wise.
Interesting bit of trivia: Bret Easton Ellis (to whom the novel is dedicated, IIRC) attended Bennington College with Tartt. Hampden College in The Secret History is a fictionalised version of Bennington, as is Camden College in Ellis's The Rules of Attraction. The two novels are essentially set in a shared universe: History mentions in passing a female undergrad who slit her wrists in a bathtub, and her suicide is a significant part of the plot of Attractions (several of the chapters are even narrated from her perspective).
I read Tartt's long-awaited follow-up The Little Friend and found it decidedly underwhelming - not bad, but nowhere near as good as her debut. I've heard from several people that her third novel The Goldfinch is as good as History or better, so I'm keen to read it.
Oh man, I'd love to hear more of your thoughts on the book.
My theories:
-- Richard or Camilla killed Henry. Shooting yourself in the head, twice, is difficult. Not strictly impossible, but difficult. In favor of Richard: Richard changes distinctly after the murder, in ways that mirror and follow the path of what Henry talks about in the garden conversation, he is able to shut up his internal voices and successfully graduate, get into grad school, for a time carry on a normal relationship. Part of his symbolic accession to personhood and his inheritance from Henry is receiving Henry's BMW; throughout the story Richard is limited by his lack of a car, he is dependent on the goodwill of others in a way that is both very symbolic and very realistic to an isolated rural school, who has what car where is a constant source of tension in the work. He kills Henry, and symbolically inherits this grant of full personhood. He becomes more human after the murder, more functional, the rest of the group becomes less functional, drifts outward into their dysfunctions. In favor of Camilla: Camilla was much more involved and agentic than indicated in the work. She is the unsung glue of the group in a big way. Richard and the other boys are always vaguely frienemies, it is never clear which boys are closer and which boys are in competition or enmity, who is in and who is out, while Camilla is always in with all the other boys. Three out of the four are constantly besotted with Camilla, Francis is also shown to be closer with her as a friend. Everyone else is willing to lie about, cover up, or minimize her involvement in their accounts; both because they want to protect her and because they don't want to admit they were under her spell.
— Richard wrote the note from "Bunny," for the purpose of bringing the group back together. Richard feeds off the group, off feeling in on the secret. They’re all starting to drift apart, the group is tearing at the seams, so he creates another crisis for them to keep their secret to try to bring them together again. He liked the game of murdering Bunny, so he creates a new crisis, maybe they will murder Julian? It fails, spectacularly, with Henry’s death.
One of my favourite fan theories came from TV Tropes:
I read this and was initially like "ha ha funny" but then I was like "I been sayin tho"
I always found Richard confusing in that he seems so unlikeable, and is clearly the butt-monkey of the friend group, then he'll report just randomly pulling normie chicks as soon as he leaves the group, who disappear as quickly as they appear in the narrative.
Depending how heavily one finds his narration unreliable, it's not hard to imagine him lying about all sorts of things, that a lot of the positive things he gets are lies or hallucinations.
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