#54: The Secret History by Donna Tartt
In the country of books about hyper intelligent, creepy young adults who may or may not be murderous lunatics, Donna Tartt’s 1992 novel reigns supreme, as it must have been the inspiration for Marisha Pessl’s overblown, pedantic blockbuster Special Topics in Calamity Physics, as well as Tana French’s The Likeness, which I read and liked earlier this year; Tartt is a masterful writer (it’s so hard to believe that The Secret History was her first published work, but not hard to believe that it was an enormous bestseller), and her characters are beautifully crafted, but members of a mysterious, frigid clique, while obviously fascinating, never become the sort of people that you ultimately care about, and when it comes to narrators French has her beat with both the extremely damaged Rob Ryan and the aggressively likeable Cassie, because while I was interested in Richard Papen I found it difficult to love and sympathize with him in the way that makes books like In the Woods, The Likeness, and even Special Topics in Calamity Physics (which, admittedly, was forced to pull the rug out in the last fifty pages to affect this feeling, but Pessl pulled it off) feel like punches to the gut.
