The Secret History in Reading with Style

Mar 04, 2011 Mickey rated it it was amazing

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This book is one of the most well-written novels I have ever read. The writing is like a Fabrege egg-ornate and ostentatious, so filled with little surprises (a well-turned phrase, an apt characterization) that the end result is dazzling and overwhelming.
There are a lot of Nabokovian elements. It’s heavily lyrical. It’s told in retrospect which gives it a soft, gloomy, doomed quality. It has a contempt for people who are boorish or unsophisticated that is concealed by a sense of noblesse oblige
This book is one of the most well-written novels I have ever read. The writing is like a Fabrege egg-ornate and ostentatious, so filled with little surprises (a well-turned phrase, an apt characterization) that the end result is dazzling and overwhelming.
There are a lot of Nabokovian elements. It’s heavily lyrical. It’s told in retrospect which gives it a soft, gloomy, doomed quality. It has a contempt for people who are boorish or unsophisticated that is concealed by a sense of noblesse oblige. It mixes in highbrow references to literature, art, languages, philosophy, etc.
I understand that these elements can be incredibly irritating to some people-natural democrats who bristle at the idea of a group of college students discussing Milton or finding A.E. Housman too pedestrian. Thankfully, I’m not one of these sorts. I liked the kind of society that these people created. I understand at the end that it was artificial and deceptive, but it also seems rather attractive.
Unlike a lot of other reviewers, I liked Richard Papen. He was not the nicest person. I don’t find him likeable so much as relatable. I grew up in a place that I hated, too. It’s difficult to be from a town that you can’t find any love for or romance in and to wonder if, being young and inexperienced in other places, there’s simply a mismatch with your surroundings or whether you’re doomed to constantly feel out of step. One passage that really spoke to me at the beginning of that novel while he was talking about his childhood:
I honestly can’t remember much else about those years except a certain mood that permeated most of them, a melancholy feeling that I associate with watching “The Wonderful World of Disney” on Sunday nights. Sunday was a sad day-early to bed, school the next morning, I was constantly worried my homework was wrong-but as I watched the fireworks go off in the night sky, over the floodlit castles of Disneyland, I was consumed by a more general sense of dread, of imprisonment within the dreary round of school and home: circumstances which, to me at least, presented empirical argument for gloom. My father was mean, and our house ugly, and my mother didn’t pay much attention to me; my clothes were cheap and my haircut too short and no one at school seemed to like me that much; and since all of this had been true for as long as I could remember, I felt things would doubtless continue in this depressing vein as far as I could foresee. In short, I felt my very existence was tainted in some subtle but essential way.”
I believe Richard was looking for something deeper than contemporary culture, and the group he fell in with, while highly affected themselves, would hold a lot of attraction for someone like Richard. They had things that he did not: money (except Bunny) and a kind of breezy carelessness that money and social status engender. It reminds me a lot of Gatsby, but Richard was less dogged about pursuing his goals. He was just a common liar.
One element that I found to be highly enjoyable was the characterizations of people who were less engaged in fantasies of wealth and the life of the mind than Richard. I loved the character of Judy Poovey and always brightened when she walked into the story. She was such a great foil for Richard and sort of stood for an alternative (but more common) college experience of parties, drug use and casual hook-ups. Some of their conversations were so ridiculous that I laughed out loud. Tartt has a good ear for the way different people speak and think. Papen, with one foot in each world, becomes a necessary bridge between the two.
I would recommend this book to people who like lyrical writing and do not require that the characters be likeable.
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Jul 10, 2015 Hilary rated it it was amazing

I really loved this one. The characters are horrible, elitist, cold, potheads, and lots of other terrible things, but for some reason I couldn't help being drawn to them. I love the references to all things Classical so much so that what I thought would be a dense 600 pages turned out to be a treat. Read it. ...more

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Jan 16, 2014 GONZA rated it liked it

I can understand why this book has many admirers, the story is particular, more than a thriller where we are looking for the guilty one, whom we have from the first page, this is a psychological noir that attempts to explain the reasons behind the murder in question. So praise to the author, but there have been times when I found it a bit too long and the book seemed to drag on a bit. That said, the story is nice and there are some great twists in the plot.

Posso capire il perché questo libro abb ...more

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