Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

The Kirkus review says it all, but I feel obliged to add my two cents, for the sake of art, or objectivity, or decency, or something. "The Secret History" fails hilariously (or depressingly, depending on how you look at it) on every level it aspires to. Its characters are wooden and unbelievable, its plot preposterous, its prose excruciating and gaseous. It's essentially a [take] of John Knowles' considerably superior "A Separate Peace," unforgivably lengthened to 500+ pages and saddled with a ludicrous pseudo-Gothic horror theme (Dionysus comes to Bennington). Every sentence seems to pose in front of a mirror and go on and on about itself, God knows why. Since Tartt can't write, she lets the cliches write for her: the first sentence of the book ends with a lament on "the gravity of our situation" (how about "how serious it was"?) and things don't improve from there. Ordinarily one might forgive this kind of thing, but Tartt so obviously wants to be taken Very Seriously that one is entitled to laugh at her ghastly English (among other things, she apparently believes that "peremptory" means "perfunctory"). More serious problems include: the cast of characters, which consists of pallid refugees from the aforementioned Knowles and from Fitzgerald, absurdly spouting 1920's-style exclamations and asides ("Goodness!", "Richard, old man!", etc.), none of whom is at all interesting, original or alive in any way; the endless torrent of Western Canon quotations, most of which serve no purpose except as vehicles for authorial vanity and pretentiousness; and the deep foolishness of the book's central assumption, which is--roughly--that a bunch of murdering thugs can be viewed as attractive and sympathetic if they can quote Homer in the original Greek. This is such obvious [bull] that it leads me to wonder what in the world its fans think they are responding to. But I guess the answer is simple: blatant appeals to intellectual snobbery still work--and on a grand scale, too, to judge from the quantity and tenor of the response. In a way it's almost touching that large numbers of people are so dazzled by all the references to Euripides, Nietzsche, and the "Five Great Cultures," so bowled over by the untranslated gobbets of Latin, Greek, and French, that they don't see that all this high culture is just window-dressing designed to disguise the worthlessness of the product itself. Interestingly, the only part of the book that's worth anything as literature is the section devoted to the miserable winter break Richard spends trying to fix up his house: with the Gothic blather in abeyance, Tartt's prose tightens up, the relentless gloom of the novel gets a plausible objective correlative in Richard's misery and isolation, and Richard himself briefly emerges as a sympathetic character dealing with real problems. It's funny, and revealing, that even Tartt's most positive reviewers repeatedly single out just this passage for criticism: they're not looking for fiction, they're looking for "class." Well, they have their reward.