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Notes -
@EdenicFaithful I just finished up Donna Tartt's The Secret History, which my wife bought for me after seeing it recommended by fashion girlies on social media. It is, at the end of the day, a high class thriller, John Grisham with literary pretensions. I enjoyed the book immensely, I wanted something relatively light after reading a lot of heavy non-fiction lately. And it felt made for me, it is a thriller following a bunch of weirdo pseudo-aristocratic classics students, and I'm the kind of guy who went to a northeastern undergrad school and wore a vintage camel hair sportcoat to a class studying Procopius' The Secret History. There's an effortpost brewing in my notes about the book's status as the progenitor of the "Dark Academia" aesthetic meme, and the memetics of online aesthetics more generally.
With the exception of classics (The Bible, Ovid, Dante, Shakespeare, etc.) which I can't avoid having an opinion on going in, I try to avoid reading about something while I am still in the process of reading the work itself. And because my wife bought it for me as a gift, and specifically referenced seeing it on social media, I kind of assumed that it was new fiction, from the past five years or so. Having finished it, I looked at a few reviews, trying to find things I hadn't caught on my read through. The setting felt vaguely 80s, but there weren't enough clear references to really pin it down, and it felt like an odd time period to pick if you weren't going to use it much and like reference Reagan or era-appropriate music...imagine my surprise when I found out the novel was written in 1992 and the reason it lacked a lot of period-references was because at the time it was written the novel was simply set in the present, with no need to let people know when it was because the underlying assumption was that elite liberal arts students would more or less always be like that, Tartt wouldn't have been able to imagine that two and a half decades later college would be so completely eaten by computerization that her novel would be rendered completely historical.
I had, of course, assumed that the novel was written today, and set in a vague past to avoid smartphones. It is tough to imagine much of novel's moody pacing working in the social media age, with characters texting or engaging in posting every event on social media. Indeed, I have trouble thinking of murder mysteries or thrillers that successfully integrate the smartphone into their plotting. Every modern novel in the genre seems to avoid them by various obvious crutches, such as lampshading that a character refuses to use cellphones, having the phone lose reception run out of batteries or be broken at every critical moment, or by the simple expedient of forgetting about it. I don't read a ton of new fiction, but I can't think of a thriller that handles cellphone usage well. Even the sci-fi novels I recall reading which featured greater communications advances failed to reflect how I actually use cell phones in reality.
So now to get to my Small Scale Questions: how does one successfully integrate the digital world into the classic murder mystery or thriller structure? What authors or works have done so? Is it even possible to do so, or does the digital age simply require that we maintain a higher willing suspension of disbelief? Does communications tech usage date any work to a particular five-year period, because communications tech is moving so fast (ie, in 2003 the gang of high school friends would have definitely used AIM, by 2008 AIM was lame and facebook messenger was everything, by 2013 nobody I knew in college used messenger for much of anything preferring snapchat, in the decade since we've seen the rise and fall of a half dozen social media services, data plans and wifi access have gone from very limited to universal, etc.)? Is there a similar literary discourse about prior technological transitions? Did the telegraph and telephone cause authors to go "oh, shit, so many plots out the window, better set this story in the past or in the wild west or something?" Did literary critics talk about how old plots were obviated by car travel?
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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