The appearance of Donna Tartt’s second novel has been an event rather than just a publication. It is hard to read The Little Friend with an innocent eye, but one is still caught by the energy of its prose. Tartt starts this novel in a very similar way to The Secret History, with a matter-of-fact reference to a murder: “For the rest of her life, Charlotte Cleve would blame herself for her son’s death because she had decided to have the Mother’s Day dinner at six in the evening rather than noon, after church, which is when the Cleves usually had it.”
But this novel is not directly about a murder. It is about the effect that the murder has on the dead boy’s family, and especially on his sister Harriet, who was less than a year old when he died, and is 12 when the novel begins. It is through Harriet’s desire to come to terms with the past and find her brother’s killer that Tartt paints her vision of family life in the American South. As Harriet trudges through one lonely summer, encountering misunderstanding, bereavement, solitude and straightforward cruelty, she drifts further and further into her obsessions.
There are none of the aesthetic sweeteners of The Secret History here, none of its beautiful people and elegant plotting. In some ways it feels like a deliberate reaction to that work. If The Secret History had one striking fault, it was the way the violence occurred so easily, even stylishly. There is a great deal of violence in The Little Friend, and it is executed in a very different style: bloody and unglamorised, with apparently endless repercussions of guilt and misery.
It is hard to give an example without giving away the plot, but the scene in which Harriet kills a bird is more shocking than the scene in The Secret History in which characters kill their own friend.
Dysfunctional as this family is, it is also humanly convincing. Harriet herself is a true, spiky child, all odd angles and unexpected depths, and her brooding on the death of her brother seems all of a piece with her recalcitrant character. It is not only Harriet who is boldly drawn — her entire family pull away from and towards one another in a convincing portrayal of fractured domesticity.
In her recreation of southern society in the 1970s, Tartt also moves beyond the middle classes. Her treatment of the poor white families on the edge of town sometimes verges on caricature, but you will rarely have read better depictions of the relationships between white employers and their black servants.
Although her social ventriloquism can be effective, the difficulty that Tartt may have experienced in writing this large novel is echoed by the unevenness of its prose. At its best, her writing fuses seamlessly with its subject: heated when the events are heated, languorous when the moment slows, precise when she ferrets out the next turn of the plot. Yet at times she seems to be reaching for
effects that she cannot control.
From the first pages of the novel, you are struck by her tendency to describe things in threes, in arching adjectival triplets. Charlotte’s heart “vaulted up for a soaring, incredulous, gorgeously cruel moment; her mother is “airy, charming, sparkling with life”; a china dinner service is “heavenly, glorious, a complete set”.
The hyperbole works as long as it is coupled to Tartt’s precise descriptions or her accurate ear for dialogue. But even if she stumbles over details, the pace of this novel remains impressive. Tartt is able to make “reading time” slow down, so that you feel you are experiencing the events she describes in real time, or even more slowly than real time. This groggy, dreamlike pace is particularly effective at moments of high drama.
Because of Tartt’s mastery of suspense, this book will grip most readers. But as you reach the last page, you may well feel a sense of relief. Tartt has created a claustrophobic world in which there is little possibility of freedom for any character. — Â