The big conflict here is the fight between different ideas about beauty There was never any possibility that he wouldn’t.
So when Richard learns that Henry and the others killed a man, of course, he throws in his lot with them immediately. It means poverty and squalor and isolation and loneliness and perhaps his own death.
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Richard attributes that intuition to Bunny’s unerring sense of how to make other people uncomfortable, but perhaps it’s just that it takes a fake to spot a fake.)Īfter that desperate, frozen December, Richard knows what it means when the classics kids leave him behind. (Bunny grasps that Richard is faking his background very early on, before anyone else. Every last one of those classics majors is wealthy, because Julian will take on no pupils who are not - except for Bunny, whose family used to be old-money wealthy and who now gets by through faking it and sponging off his friends, and Richard, whose family was never wealthy and who now gets by just through faking it. Richard knows what it means to be in with the classics kid in-crowd: It means warmth, comfort, beauty, and wealth, so much endless wealth, thrown about so casually. That section is harrowing in a far more visceral way than Henry’s account of killing the farmer, and after Henry arrives to save Richard’s life, it helps set up the deep and unquestioning loyalty to the group that Richard assumes throughout the rest of the novel. The inverse of the country house interlude follows shortly after, when everyone goes home for Christmas and Richard finds himself all alone in Hampden, freezing to death in his little unheated attic sublet with the hole in the roof. It’s what I immediately think of when I think of The Secret History. And in my head, it’s grown to take up the entire first half of the book until the murder, even though in reality it’s only a few pages long. In certain ways, this section is the emotional core of everything that follows: the lost Eden of perfect accord to which all of the classics kids find themselves struggling to return. Much of their glamour comes from the idyll of weekends at Francis’s country house, with its “dizzy little turret rooms, the high-beamed attic, an old sleigh in the cellar,” and the classics kids quoting The Waste-Land to each other as they row around a birch-lined lake before lunching on ham sandwiches and champagne they’ve smuggled past the groundskeeper in a teapot. But also I would enjoy living their lives, or parts of them, at least for just a little bit. Richard appears genuinely impressed by all of the above. I know: These kids wander around in suits and ties to attend their college classes in the late ’80s/early ’90s! Henry refused to take the SATs because he objects to the aesthetics of them and he’s also translating Paradise Lost into Latin for fun. And as ridiculous and pretentious a crew as they are, I absolutely do, every time. These kids are pretentious as hell, but also I would really enjoy their lifestyleįor The Secret History to work, you have to buy into the glamour of the classics majors, at least a little bit. Let’s talk about what leads up to the moment when Bunny’s best friends push him over a cliff. His sin is less moral than it is aesthetic.īut I’m getting ahead of myself. In the end, it seems as though Bunny dies not because it’s the only way everyone can avoid life in prison, but because Bunny’s reaction to the first murder (only a farmer! who cares!) is really a little bit gauche. He’s thinking about how much Bunny annoys him. Richard takes pains to assure us that when he finally participates in the murder, he is not thinking about how Bunny’s death will save his friends. jump to killing him as the only solution awfully quickly. Sure, Bunny knows too much and he’s an unstable liability, but Richard and Co. We spend the next 250-ish pages trying to work out the why.Īnd yet when we finally come to Bunny’s murder, it’s still not entirely clear why he has to die. The prologue immediately reveals who will die (Bunny), who will kill him (all of his best friends, including the narrator, Richard), and where it will happen (a ravine in the woods near campus). The first half of The Secret History stands nearly on its own as a neat and gripping horror story, a kind of inverted murder mystery. (If you would like to discuss spoilers in the comments, please make sure to label them clearly.) I’ve read up through the end of the book, but there won’t be any spoilers in the main post. In this first conversation, we’re covering everything from the prologue up to the end of Book I. Welcome to the first Vox Book Club discussion for May! This month, we’re reading Donna Tartt’s The Secret History, a tale of deeply pretentious yet lovable college students, murder, and the mysteries of Bacchus.