The Secret History in Overdue Podcast

Oct 22, 2015 Julie rated it it was ok · review of another edition

Shelves: overhyped, crime, campus-novel

Untidy, undisciplined writing; a cast of insipid, implausible characters; awkward time shifts; no balance or finesse. Boring and ridiculous.

The Secret History reads like the product of a writing seminar in which students are encouraged to infuse every passage with descriptions that appeal to all five senses, even--nay, especially--if it distracts from the quality of the writing or the advancement of the narrative. Every page is over-saturated with descriptions like these:

-"That dark cavern of a Untidy, undisciplined writing; a cast of insipid, implausible characters; awkward time shifts; no balance or finesse. Boring and ridiculous.

The Secret History reads like the product of a writing seminar in which students are encouraged to infuse every passage with descriptions that appeal to all five senses, even--nay, especially--if it distracts from the quality of the writing or the advancement of the narrative. Every page is over-saturated with descriptions like these:

-"That dark cavern of a room, with vaulted ceilings and a fire crackling in the fireplace, our faces luminous somehow, and ghostly pale. The firelight magnified our shadows, glinted off the silver, flickered high upon the walls; its reflection roared orange in the windowpanes as if a city were burning outside, The whoosh of the flames was like a flock of birds, trapped and beating in a whirlwind near the ceiling."

No! Too much! Stop! "Its reflection roared orange"? That's a mixed metaphor! A reflection does not "roar," a "roar" does not have color. I'm all for poetic license, but this writing comes off as amateurish. And it goes on for another 628 pages!

The whole text is in desperate need of a good editor. It could be 350 pages shorter, and could lose about 50% of its adjectives. There should be more focus on character development, rather than going into excruciating and pointless detail about the characters' various movements (phone calls, comings and goings, glass refillings, and the CONSTANT "he ran a hand through his hair").

Any action is (to use a phrase the narrator uses) "slow and simmering... postponed and diverted in any number of ways." Unfortunately, the intrigue is postponed and diverted for so long, and the text is packed with such monotonous fluff, that by the time the novel hits its climax in the last dozen or so pages, the action feels not only ridiculous, farfetched, and implausible, but like a cheap and chintzy payoff after the too-slow burn of the first 550+ pages.

Not only are the scenes dull, the characters that fill them are dull, and completely implausible. It takes hundreds of pages for Francis, Henry, and Charles to feel like distinct characters, and it is not until the last dozen or so pages that the narrator declares himself as mostly a "bystander"--an apt description, as he would be utterly forgettable if we weren't forced to see the story from his bland, emotionless, detached perspective.

Perhaps the best way to sum up the novel is to quote the narrator himself, as he describes "the objectionable little documentary" that is this story:
"I marvel at how detached it is in viewpoint, eccentric in detail, largely devoid of emotional power. . . I am sorry to present such a sketchy and disappointing exegesis of what is in fact the central part of my story." He goes on to compare it to a book that he had read and found disheartening, because it is "entirely bereft of lurid detail. At points of greatest suspense it would suddenly, and not without some coyness, switch to some entirely unrelated matter. . . By far the major portion of the book was devoted to spinsterish discourses on prison life . . . It was a waste of five dollars."

His description of a book that he hated sounds too self-aware for me not to wonder if Tartt deliberately set out to write a "detached, eccentric" novel "devoid of emotional power." But then. . . why would she write the sort of book that even her own narrator thinks is a waste of five (or in this case, fifteen) dollars?

I like a good campus novel. I like a book with rich detail and ambiance. I like the idea of a "literary suspense" novel. But this one just didn't hit its mark. ...more

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Mar 05, 2014 Ilias rated it really liked it

Shelves: 2014

Impressively suspenseful. There was, however an awful lot of Latin being thrown around among these supposed students of Greek. But like yeah, I enjoyed it. It was ridiculously well paced.

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