BOOKS: Donna Tartt - , A Secret HIistory,The Little Friend, The Goldfinch

Donna Tartt: The Goldfinch (2013),  A Secret History, The Little Friend

These three books are all compelling, engrossing, polished, singularly wrought novels. They are nearly genre-free, following no escapist recipe.  All feature children as protagonists. Yet the narrative is never compromised with a simple point of view. The inevitability of the story proceeds from fully drawn characters, and so the plots, complex as they are, feel Dickensian in their resolutions. 

The three novels could be classed as mysteries or thrillers, because they are truly hard to put down, the quality of suspense so imbues the writing.  In The Goldfinch, a little boy who worships his mother “saves” a famous painting after the Met is blown up by a terrorist bomb. In A Secret History, a young man goes east to college and his choice to study the classics leads to conspiracy and murder.   The Little Friend, the most upsetting of the three, is about a little by who is kidnapped from his yard during a family holiday dinner.  His young sister determines to solve the mystery of his disappearance.

Each features meticulously wrought settings, breath-taking moments of danger, sympathetic treatment of characters as their amoral, evil, cruel, insensitive personalities and choices wreak grief, derail careers, and precipitate breakdowns from which there is no return. 

Tartt’s characters’ downhill slides turn the stomach of any parent:  long  (repetitive) descriptions of alcohol and drug use, theft, lost ambitions, cruel parents and guardians, the pitiful loneliness of lovely children callously neglected. 

The novels end where they began: the look-back the grown-up child has shared with you closes the account of the childhood tragedy.  There is distance and coolness now; the past is the past, about the only comfort Tartt permits her readers.