#tartt

In an interview, Tartt lists her favorite authors and the names of a few works. I have listed the most popular works from each author and the specific ones she recommended as well.

Homer

The Iliad

The Odyssey

Greek Poets and Tragedians

Argonautica

Antigone

Prometheus Bound

The Oresteia

Medea

Oedipus Rex

The Bacchae

The Frogs

Dante

Inferno

Purgatorio

Paradiso

Shakespeare

“I went back and read Macbeth and Hamlet during the pandemic”

Macbeth

Hamlet

Dickens

“Dickens was a part of my familial landscape, the air I breathed.”

A Tale of Two Cities

Great Expectations

Nabokov

Pale Fire

Lolita

Proust

In Search of Lost Time

Swann’s Way

Dostoevsky

Crime and Punishment

The Brothers Karamazov

Yeats

The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats

Irish Fairy and Folk Tales

Borges

Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings

Edith Wharton

The House of Mirth

Ethan Frome

Evelyn Waugh

Brideshead Revisited

Helena

Salinger

Catcher in the Rye

Virginia Woolf

Mrs. Dalloway

Orlando

Edward St. Aubyn

The Patrick Melrose Novels

Haruki Murakami

Kafka on the Shore

Norwegian Wood

Olga Tokarczuk

Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead

Don DeLillo

White Noise

Underworld

W.G. Sebald

Austerlitz

The Rings of Saturn

Joan Didion

The Year of Magical Thinking

The White Album

Other Specific Books

Memoirs d’Outre-Tome by Chateaubriand

Jigsaw by Sybille Bedford

All for Nothing by Walter Kempowski

Offside Tension - Jamie Tartt x Y/N

Masterlist - Next Chapter

Chapter 4 - Lines Crossed, Hearts Questioned

The past few days had been... strange for Y/N. She wasn’t exactly sure when things had shifted, but something about Jamie Tartt had lodged itself in her thoughts, and it was beginning to feel impossible to shake. The banter between them was harmless, playful even, but every smirk he gave her lingered longer than it should have in her mind. Every time he called her “love” in that casually cheeky way, her stomach did this ridiculous little flip that made her want to kick herself.

Why, of all people, was Jamie Tartt starting to get under her skin?

She didn’t have much time to dwell on it this morning, though. Training had wrapped up smoothly, and the team was dispersing. Y/N was standing near the pitch, watching the players file out, when Jamie walked past her, his usual swagger on full display.

[REVIEW] The Secret History by Donna Tartt

3/5 stars (★★★)

DISCLAIMER: I did not hold back on my bitchiness in this review. If you loved this book, don’t read this. This is a HATERS-ONLY zone.

Yikes! Many problems with this book! -- and I have quotes to back it up since a good chunk of Donna Tartt’s readers seem to be allergic to analyzing the actual text in favor of fetishizing the illusory aesthetics this story (poorly) capitalizes on. Just like Bunny, this book “disintegrates under analysis. It can only be defined by the anecdote, the chance encounter or the sentence overheard.” Yup, sounds about right: If you squint your eyes and look at this book from a distance, it seems attractive, but after you spend like 5 minutes with it you lowkey start to regret ever being literate. (It’s true, dear Reader, it happened to me). 

The first 100 pages were agonizing and really hard to get through -- reading it felt like pulling out my own teeth, as my friends who had the displeasure of having to listen to me decimate this book over spurious and frantic texts at 4 AM can attest to. The fact that the narrative climax -- Bunny’s death -- was covered within 40ish pages and then nothing happened afterwards pissed me off. The aftermath of the murder, though easier to digest since by then I’d gotten the hang of Tartt’s writing style, was just a flurry of unnecessary smokes-and-mirrors philandering filled with bad dialogue and melodrama that finishes off with an underwhelming epilogue that was as flat as Bunny’s ass. 

Undoubtedly, the biggest issue with The Secret History is how goofy, senselessly dull, and horrifically misinformed it is. Also oppressively white. Like, you’re telling me this is the book for dark academics when really it’s all just >600 pages of a group that definitely would’ve been MAGA supporters if they were around in the 21st century? Sweet brown Palestinian Jesus, this book was genuinely awful. I would say it was only a few leagues above contemporary AI slop, with one of its only advantages being that it was most definitely written by a human being; yet unfortunately, this said human being loves the sound of her own voice and cares more about sounding Very Smart, Very Informed over actually educating herself on hard facts or subscribing to the inherent ambiguity and open-mindedness that’s necessary to studying Classics and all its related subject materials. 

Before writing this review, I looked at other people who loved the book's opinions on it, and a lot of it is just flowery over-romanticized garbage. Honestly, at one point I did question my reality (because OCD) and go, "Wait, am I actually the problem? Like people do really love her books so I should listen to what they have to say before mindlessly hating on it," but then I realized that everyone who adores this book are the same white people who idolize overconsumption romantasy hetslop on Booktok. 

The words I heard a lot of people tossing around were very beautiful indeed, with reviews hailing TSH as a "haunting, modern classic" just like "all the best Greek tragedies" due to the plot being "full of sorrow and struggle, but often accompanied by pure loyalty and divine inspiration." (What). Many claim Tartt to be this brilliant "goddess" of writing who's well-versed and knowledgeable of "the secret history" of Classics and dark academia, as exemplified by her characters’ "fatal flaws," long (i.e. incorrect) dissections of Classic philosophical theory, pathetically obtuse diatribes on the "action" and "stagnation" of life, and ongoing discovery of "the lifelong quest for the picturesque." All of that is total horseshit. There are so many people gushing over the book being multifaceted, edgy, and layered with meaning -- but, even as a surface-level compliment, this sort of flattery only reveals a complete lack of education on literally everything the book claims to stand for and embody.

Edging With The Old Wise Sage Trope

Others have pointed it out, but to start off, there is a glaring discrepancy between what I was led to believe the book was about by the book’s synopsis versus what it really was. The summary given at the back of my (library) copy says,

“Under the influence of their charismatic classics professor, a group of clever, eccentric misfits at an elite New England college discover a way of thinking and living that is a world away from the humdrum existence of their contemporaries.”

(Tartt should hire a better advertising team. Or maybe they’re doing exactly what she wants by using straight-up lies to reel in some poor guileless readers, who knows).

In all the >600 pages that I read, I did not even catch a glimpse of this aforementioned infamously witty and charming classics professor in Julian. He was almost non-existent. When he actually appears, he only has a few flat lines that did more to convince me that he’s a fully functioning sociopath than anything fatherly or kind. I have had my fair share of parasocial, overdependent relationships with my humanities teachers, and I can safely say that what Julian and his students had was plain weird and borderline illegal:

“[T]here was never any doubt that he did not wish to see us in our entirety, or see us, in fact, in anything other than the magnificent roles he had invented for us: . . . -- smooth-cheeked, soft-skinned, well-educated, and rich.”

Like bruh okay it’s giving Hitler and his Aryan youth programs! Insane way to beautify your all-white students that are more than half your age and who are most definitely going to have receding hairlines by 30. Legitimately eerie.  

I (foolishly) believed Julian and his apparently scintillating intellectual discourses with his students would have an important presence in the novel. I thought he would challenge my thinking, -- because that’s what Tartt said Julian would do: “How . . . can I possibly make the Dean of Studies understand that there is a divinity in our midst?” (Divinity my ass, Henry) -- but alas! Go girl, give us absolutely nothing! It’s really telling that Julian shows up so rarely, because the book clearly wants to piggyback off of his ~ hermetic worldview ~ and drive home its life-changing effect on his students, but he never makes more than a few appearances, so Tartt never really gives herself the chance to explain what his worldview even is, much less establish some clear, arguable ideas about what it does, narrative-wise. 

I feel really cheated with Julian’s character in particular, which I suppose ties back to how disappointed Henry and even Richard was with him in the end: “I find it very hard to believe he’s done this, you know . . . It’s just such a cowardly thing to have done. That's why he left, you know. Because he was afraid.” So yeah, Julian was always meant to be a spineless deadbeat. But still, it was endlessly frustrating how Tartt kept telling us about how great and eccentric this professor is, but we never actually see it. I was half expecting, half hoping Julian to be some sort of a disguised Mephistophelean antagonist who somehow tricks his students into committing murder, but he really had nothing to do with Bunny’s death. He didn’t even give much of a fuck after it happened either because “strong emotion was distasteful to him, and a display of feeling normal by modern standards would to him have seemed exhibitionist and slightly shocking.” Like bruh. 

Criticizing The Sexy Hexa-Hooligans (Spoiler Alert: Not Very Sexy Nor Hooliganish, Just Unwell), Part 1

Hence, the synopsis’ other promise of “a group of clever, eccentric misfits” also falls insanely short. Like with Julian, we are constantly told and yet never actually shown how “smart” Henry, Francis, Charles, Camilla, Bunny, and Richard are. The type of luxurious, esoteric “living that is a world away from the humdrum existence of their contemporaries” that the back of the book mentions basically just amounts to inconsiderate loitering in hoity-toity expensive restaurants, doing fuckall in a dusty mansion in the countryside with a lackadaisical atmosphere of entitled ennui, and bratty vacations to Italy that are quickly abandoned and never actually appreciated by the people Tartt claims would be the first ones to understand its value, but they really don’t. It’s a very unappealing, typical, and fraudulent existence for people with money; something I could read about if I gave a shit about multimillionaires or famous celebrities who’ve never worked a real day in their life. It’s not something ethereal or out of ordinary that deserves awe, let alone respect.

While looking over the reviews for this book, I found out that a journalist confirmed with Tartt that the six main characters and Hampden are based on her alma mater Berkeley. TSH fans squealed about this and voiced their admiration for these elusive real--life “geniuses,” but if I was one of these six muses, I’d be embarrassed at the nasty, rotting portrait that Tartt painted of me. I don’t care if it’s accurate -- that behavior and personality should be bullied more, not glorified.

I also saw someone say that "the real tragedy" (where even is the tragedy in TSH to begin with? I cannot see how any of the events in the book count as "tragic" in the Classical sense, which is the definition Tartt is using, yet laughably misunderstands?) was that they weren't a part of the main "friend group" in this book, which they characterize as "a secretive circle of young self-styled scholars who quote Classics over dirty [m]artinis, toast[s] to living forever, and commit various acts of evil when they get too consumed by their Greek homework." This is a poor description of what these characters actually do. It also sadly buys into what Tartt and her characters want you to believe about them: That they're an ultra-intelligent, exclusive, and otherworldly bunch who're grand masters of the ancient texts and some of the last remaining yet altogether honorable preservers of old, forgotten knowledge. If you think that’s who they are, then you're missing the entire point. I can’t emphasize enough how if you even want to be like any of the main characters in this book, it’s a red flag and you need to get yourself some help. (You’re also probably not that nice of a person. Work on yourself babe, it’s never too late!)

Tartt’s characters were laughably and grossly unintelligent. And yes, I do mean literally, denotatively unintelligent. None of them -- and I do mean none of them, including Julian -- could even have a semi-productive and/or decent conversation with my elementary school students, let alone be trusted on knowing the absolute secrets of the universe. All of them are pasty white trustfund baby losers who don’t know zilch about the real world. This is a canon fact:

“[N]one of them were the least bit interested in anything that went on in the world, and their ignorance of current events and even recent history was rather astounding.”

These fuckers didn’t even know about the moon landing in 1969. I’m supposed to believe they possess “Holmes-like” talents of deduction and studious refinement? They probably couldn’t even give me a basic, middle-school level timeline of the events leading up to World War II. By all standards and measures of what counts as “smart,” they are anything but. For example, Bunny is said to “seldom read the required texts or supplemental books for any course. Instead, his knowledge of any given subject tended to be a hodgepodge of confused facts, often strikingly irrelevant or out of context, that he happened to remember from classroom discussions or believed himself to have read somewhere.” He can’t even spell basic words or use grammar correctly -- indeed, it’s a trademark of his writing style -- and he also hilariously believes “[a]ll the world shoulda been taxed,” which is just rich coming from him. The other characters follow this same hypocritical makeup.

I suppose all of the kids’ glorified below-than-averageness can be traced back to their dick-sucking idolatry to Julian, which was lowkey a form of grooming and intellectual stunting. Julian states, “I believe that having a great diversity of teachers is harmful and confusing for a young mind.” Which is just a pretty way of admitting he’s a racist, gatekeeping, and egomaniacal shithead who probably thinks academia should only be reserved for the “real” scholars AKA rich old white men like him. Barring the fact that this “one teacher, one master” viewpoint has been proven to be highly limiting and detrimental to the “young minds” he professes to care so much about cultivating, it really is just him pathetically manufacturing his own fan club that’ll just repeat back his thoughts to him because everybody else sees him for the washed-out fraud that he is. Georges Laforgue -- bless him -- near the end of the book even summarizes it quite adeptly: “Julian . . . will never be a scholar of the very first rate, and that is because he is only capable of seeing things on a selective basis.” And it’s so painfully true. 

Part 2: Nazi Fan Club Punk Tactics

Julian and his cult have an explicitly white supremacist worldview, and it boggles me how so many fans of TSH completely miss it. Aside from the microaggressive slurs (they repeatedly mention “Oriental languages” and “the Twelve Great Cultures,” not to mention say actual slurs like the R word and “Chinaman”), it’s so clear that all of them have a self-imposed nescience to literally anything outside their Classics wheelhouse. They talk about “horrid comparisons one sometimes hears in Eastern religions” and how “the practice of Zen” is “goofball advice.” Julian even has this racist “Isramic jihad” sideplot that establishes him as someone who sympathizes “on principle -- with royalists instead of revolutionaries,” which does nothing to the plot and only convinces me that Tartt wanted to sprinkle in some Islamophobia for her fellow white readers who’ll no doubt praise this book for including Arab people at all because, hey, at least that’s woke. 

God, there are so many small examples of their casual racism. I’d be sitting here all day if I deigned to list all of them. Most notably, they perpetually speak about how “[a]ll truly civilized people -- the ancients no less than us -- have civilized themselves through the wilful repression of the old, animal self.” BITCH THAT’S HOW WHITE COLONIZERS JUSTIFIED MASS GENOCIDE OF “savages” AND CULTURAL ASSIMILATION. GET THE FUCK OUT OF HERE ABOUT “truly civilized” -- the ancient Greeks and Romans drank piss and used ballsack sweat as horny perfume! Nothing “sophisticated” or “elite” about them other than the fact that their aesthetics, histories, cultures, beliefs, fashion, and iconography have been appropriated by the racist West to promote white supremacist ideals of “upper” versus “lower” civilizations. This rhetoric of “the old, animal self” is pseudo-science eugenicist bullshit! Like, you’re gonna say that just because you’re supposedly “[o]bsessed with duty, piety, loyalty, [and] sacrifice” -- which are ideals that are considered “chilling” to “modern tastes” apparently -- then that puts you in the same league as the ever-noble, pure, and illustrious Greeks and Romans? Motherfucker, ALL human civilizations and cultures are interested in those themes! IT’S THE HUMAN CONDITION!!!

Paradoxically, they also like to “don” this Orientalist costume of transcendental savagery and mystic animalism whenever they feel like it, as is revealed through their glazed recollections of their orgy-porgy hobo bacchanal: “[T]hey marked his passage to another world in impersonal and almost tribal fashion.” Be so for real, you idiots are wearing your great aunt’s stinky attic bedsheets and fucking each other raw in the grass and mud. They compare themselves to “some savage unable to understand its true purpose -- transforming it into a weapon rack, say, or a flower-decked fetish” whenever it’s romantically convenient for them, but otherwise anything pertaining to “the Orient” like “a little black mahout in gilt turban and breeches” on an ornamental Victorian clock is “diabolical” and demonically malicious. Yet whenever anything relating to the racial Other is mentioned, they are all too quick to expose their utter stupidity and lack of real education on these topics: “So is this some Hindu kind of thing?” Dude.

Their disgusting superiority complexes and “repugnant” elitist values bred nothing but joint intellectual stagnation (they, like Julian, all deliberately put themselves in echo chambers made up of their own preposterous thoughts), as well as total ignorance to how anything practically works. 

These characters would’ve definitely loved analyzing Taylor Swift’s “masterfully deep” lyrics (~ TORTURED POETS DEPARTMENT, AMIRITE? ~) that are really just thinly disguised dogwhistles to Nazism and white supremacy. I think they would’ve adored Harry Potter, identifying as # Ravenclaws and bright champion scholars who chase their dreams and knowledge at all costs -- when really the entire foundation of their so-called academic prestige (moreso farce, I’d say) is built upon bigotry, prejudice, hate, and narrow-minded dogmatism that was as extreme as it was comically contradictory. They were all very, very empty-headed. And, quite frankly -- and this I find more intolerable -- they were all boring as fuck! (And I have read entire bricks of novels that are considered boring as fuck, so that is indeed saying something).

(And I know this is petty -- what can I expect from a book written by an American white woman in the 1990s -- but none of them are even brunette or have brown eyes, or a particularly dark complexion (is “dark academia” just a joke to you people?) All of them were blonde and red-headed. One of them even wore a pince-nez that I was supposed to find charming and sexy, but really I just imagined a doddering old Republican grandma who thinks “the gays” are out to get them. Like what is this Caucasity? Highkey cringe. Painfully embarrassing).

Part 3: Performative Aestheticism vs. Moralism That Would Make Even Oscar Wilde Weep

In addition to the racism, they also feel zero guilt or remorse for brutally dismembering a man because hey, they were under a drug-induced orgiastic murderous frenzy (it happens to the best of us), and, besides, they were able to cover up no problem. (Boys will be boys who recklessly pursue forbidden divine knowledge and Ovidian metamorphosis, inhumane cruelty be damned!).

They all struck me as vapidly counterfeit and performative, more concerned with maintaining a weak and hollow veneer of erudition and class that they not only severely lacked, yet also proved time and time again to be incapable of ever having. Tartt even draws attention to how they’re all essentially playacting their erudite roles through “intensely cultivated” means that they’re ultimately unable to sustain, the same way one cannot wear a mask any longer than they wear their own face. For example, “Bunny’s tweed jacket was slung across the back of his chair, exposing several large rips and stains in the lining.” So you’re supposed to be fabulously wealthy, but you still insist on wearing ripped “vintage” tweed jackets just for the vibes of it. Maybe you deserved to get murdered. (And yes, Bunny is quickly revealed to only be pretending he has wealth even though his family is legitimately broke, but I still find it ridiculous that he wore such foppish and raggedy clothes. Like he did not need to do that; he just cared too much about looking like the starved penniless scholar. Meanwhile his brothers are big-time lawyers in New York and Bunny himself regularly goes on extravagant vacations using a combination of his parents’ allowance and his friend Henry’s money). 

The Beautiful Butthurt Lie of Dark Academia

Ironically, TSH encapsulates everything superficial, performative, and insubstantially hypocritical about the "dark academia" aesthetic that's sweeping cottagecore Pinterest boards, romantic tragedy Tumblr accounts who sigh over Romeo and Juliet as a passionate love story (yeah right), and BookTok, which is its own circle of illiterate Hell. Many people have said that the book has a spellbinding, mesmeric, and almost hypnotizing quality despite it being very firmly set in the “unromantic 1980s.” Tartt apparently makes up for that by filling her book with the "unabashedly intellectual” and “geeky,” but even these supposed indicators of the book’s “universal” appeal are pale, skewed, and just wrong imitations of the real thing. People read TSH and yearn to “leave the phenomenal world, and enter into the sublime” (physically rolled my eyes with that one), but they fail to see how even Tartt herself calls attention to the fact that this surreal, transcendent world her characters are chasing is pure delusion -- cheap escapist fantasy at best and weaponized self-denial at worst. 

The first paragraph of TSH roughly sums up the mood of the book, but not if you take it at face value. (If you’re an impressionable, misinformed person with zero basic literacy skills coupled with a desperate desire to seem educated and cultured on the internet, which very likely fuels a characteristic tendency to over-romanticize gratuitous mediocrity, then you would’ve probably found the opening paragraph very deep and profound). On the first page, we meet Richard Papen (hilariously stupid name, by the way. I thought I could hold off, but it must be said: His nickname could be Dick PeePee. In fact that is my mode of address for him henceforth). Dick PeePee says that he thinks his fatal flaw is “a morbid longing for the picturesque at all costs.” The vibe he was going for was probably John Keats (I’m thinking “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” since they’re studying Greek), but this introduction immediately tells me this guy is in the same league as white male “artists” who abuse their muses for “the sake of art.” And I was right. Very early on, we learn that Dick PeePee’s values are more fallacious vagaries than real ideals; they’re vague and dim-witted understandings of what love, beauty, and wisdom actually are -- which, to be fair, are things nobody really grasps when they start college -- hence why going to college and learning about the world is so crucial -- but he arguably does not undergo any significant development or discover anything interesting regarding these abstract concepts. By the end of the book, he’s still the same dumbass who worships the ghosts of his unreliable memories more than any actual form or substance. 

Only just narrowly escaping the terrors of studying STEM, at the start of the book, Dick PeePee arrives at his super preppy and prestigious(ish) New England college to slowly become obsessed and then is promptly initiated as a second-rate member of the mysterious and selective Classics program taught by Julian, a charismatic and seemingly benevolent teacher who also serves as a paternal (AKA lowkey pedophilic) influence on all of them. The Greek class is a cultlike, elitist group made up of Oscar Wilde wannabes who think running off to Argentina or Saskatchewan when shit hits the fan counts as “problem-solving.” Since Dick PeePee comes from an abusive and “poor” background (I say that in quotation marks because his “poverty” was so infuriatingly fake), where beauty and aestheticism are nowhere to be found, he naturally wants to immerse himself amongst this group of white wealthy, fashion-challenged students. He wants to befriend them, have sex with them, live with them in the country, do drugs with them, and essentially become them regardless of their ever-spiraling hedonism -- which eventually results in all of them committing cold-blooded murder (twice!). When the story ends, the group has pretty much gone to the pits, with some members (the only interesting members) dead, and everybody who’s left behind just decides that entering an airheaded lavender marriage or playing grieving widow slash caretaker to one’s dying grandmother is better than addressing just what the fuck happened during their college days. They all want to move on except Dick PeePee, who is unable to leave it behind and therefore burdens me with telling his one and only real story. (His words, not mine). 

Part 4: You Could All Really Benefit from Watching My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic. (Yu-Gi-Oh! Duel Monsters Is Also Acceptable).

So you're supposed to like these characters while at the same time are hyper-aware of the fact that they're very unreal -- they are, after all, portraits in hindsight fabricated by someone reliving his “glory days” in university, which have plunged in unrequited obsession. You're not supposed to relate to them per se, but you are meant to envy and eventually pity them. Obviously, Tartt isn’t trying to tell us that a Byronic love of beauty is equivalent to an amoral life. Our wet-wipe band of Classics fetishists (who are all lowkey fucking each other because why do the ancients get to have all the fun?) may think they are living a life of decadent poetry and ephemeral meaning, but we (at least the readers with half a brain) know they aren't, and their lives are actually godawful, selfish, and hideously-rehearsed parades of misery and imminent insignificance:

“It’s unfortunate, but there it is. Neither one cares about anybody but himself -- or herself, as the case may be. They like to present a unified front but I don’t even know how much they care about each other.”

Through the six main characters’ mutual indifference towards one another, despite claiming to be close-knit friends, Tartt (rather unintentionally) reveals that life's true beauty and worldly pleasures cannot be attained without a humane regard for others. All six of the main characters prioritize the fulfillment of their own vain desires, and it leads to nothing but irrevocably damaged relationships (that weren’t all that meaningful to begin with), unspeakable trauma, and pointless death. If you try to be the only winner, then everybody loses. 

I guess in this sense you can argue that TSH, in spite of its very bleak portrayal of human interrelationships, is not nihilistic because the main characters' behaviors result in no meaning -- in fact, they even result in unmeaning, which is best exemplified through the stupid-ass bacchanal(s) that Henry suggests they engage in. That was arguably the point of no return (which Charles even acknowledges: “The idea of that fucking bacchanal in the first place -- who thought of that?”), but then you find out that they’ve been doing this hippie stoned-white-people-in-the woods type shit for months whilst trying to convince themselves it’s enlightening, -- “It was all in the interests of science” -- when it’s really just one insanely bad drug trip after another in historically inaccurate Greek cosplay. (The half-assed chitons made out of bedsheets were truly comical, it was like watching five-year-olds get into their mother’s makeup table and raiding her closet, only to come out looking like they got a discount on Spirit Halloween apparel). Like. The hills are not alive with the orgastic vibrations of the cosmos, you don’t need to go to Argentina, you need a capital-M MENTAL HOSPITAL!!!! Brain damage, for real! How did none of you get STDs or viral infections from rawdogging that much wildlife and nature for hours at a time! What the fuck! (Funnily enough, at one point Dick PeePee says he is “not a great believer in psychiatry,” and I just went oh I’m sure!!!!!! We can tell!!!!!!) 

And the cherry on top of it all is that these dumb-as-bricks individuals don't even like themselves or each other. I saw some people praising the book’s “friendship aspect” and “the very human yearning to belong and be accepted by people we admire.” (What). According to them, TSH illustrates

“the sacrifices we make to keep friendships intact, the insecurity we feel when we think we might not be completely accepted by our friends after all, and the paranoia we experience when it seems our friends may have betrayed us . . . [T]he feeling of invincibility we get from having great friends, and the melancholy and loneliness that follow the disintegration of a once-great friendship. The book basically reads like an elegy on a great friendship, and one doesn't necessarily have to share Richard's intellectual attitude towards life, his morality or even his morbid longing for the picturesque to be able to relate to that. It's enough to have yearned for close friendship and been insecure in friendship.”

Okay, sure. But what fucking “friendship” are you talking about? Is the “friendship” in the room with us, because it certainly wasn’t in this book. At NO POINT do they actually like each other, even when Dick PeePee talks about their bygone, halcyon days at Francis’ country house. EVEN THEN, there was nasty shit brewing between everyone that homeboy was blissfully unaware of, so he can certainly reminisce fondly on the supposed “friendship” that he (never) had, but we as the audience most definitely shouldn’t! None of it was real! Everything was fake! That’s not love! It’s not even mutual respect! They’re all backstabbers willing to throw anyone under the bus just to save themselves. There was no real affection, no real camaraderie, and definitely no sense of loyalty or unity. (What kind of “friendships” are you people having?)

And, quite frankly, who would even want to be “friends” with the main six anyway? They’re shells! Besides Bunny and Henry (who both equally suck anyway), the others are frustratingly thin, flaccid, and unimaginative. Francis has no personality traits besides being superficially gay (and not even in a cunty campy way, just stereotypical and therefore tastelessly gay); Camilla was just a swan-necked, androgynous, and delicately generic victim/slut female love interest who literally does nothing except frailly step on glass, get abused by her brother, and yearn for Henry, who so clearly sees her as more of a decorous sexual object than a person; and Charles was pretty much just a self-destructive perverted maniac. Yet, despite their hollow characters, these three kept popping up on every page -- at least one of them appears in virtually every scene. So it's almost impressive how poorly developed they all are.

The Section Where I Use My Two Useless English Degrees

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Back to the first passage and Dick PeePee’s “lifelong quest for the picturesque.” Here Tartt is actually referencing a well-known aspect of Greek drama, particularly tragedy, which is the concept of “hamartia” or a fatal flaw. This is already a loaded term in itself -- hotly debated! -- but, in the Aristotelian tradition, which is the one TSH is (trying to) invoke here, this fatal flaw is basically a crucial error or accident that inevitably leads to the downfall of a tragic hero/heroine. A common “hamartia” in Greek tragedies is hubris, which is basically thinking you’re better than the gods or can escape fate. Exhibit A is Oedipus, who, like many a doomed mortal before him, met his fate on the same path he took to avoid it (i.e. fucking his Mom, killing his Dad to become king, and becoming both brother and daddy to his children/siblings, which then leads him to surrender his throne out of shame and gouge out his eyes. Rippies). 

Essentially, one’s “harmatia” is inescapable -- an inherent defect or shortcoming that may even seem noble at first (Hamlet’s wish to unmask his dead father’s murderer earns him the credentials of being tactful, patient, cunning, and clever), but ultimately leads to their demise (see: how Hamlet fucks himself over for being a procrastinating little tit who should’ve just stayed in Wittenberg with his boyfriend Horatio instead of playing the vengeful, angsty theater-kid plus prince of darkness who left killing his uncle to the last possible minute).

My lessons on literary terminology aside, what I’m trying to say here is that Dick PeePee is trying to align himself with the “Renaissance” men and classic tragedian heroes of old by saying he has this “fatal flaw,” which subliminally tells us that this said flaw has already resulted in his “downfall" -- something he plans to reveal to us as the novel progresses. It’s certainly a good “hook” into the story -- especially with the macabre opening that mentions Bunny being frozen dead (we get this almost virginal image of a pure-white rabbit, which his name bastardizes, encased in pure-white snow and tainted by blood: very The Picture of Dorian Gray) -- but, once you get to know Dick PeePee a little bit -- even within the next few pages -- you realize he’s really not as All That as he claims to be. (I truly, truly hated the way he talked. It oozed of overexaggerated pretension and an almost calculated affectation). 

In fact, none of the characters had "fatal flaws" that evoked pity or a sense of tragedy because  they were all just rich pretentious alcoholics -- “I always rise early. The morning is the best time for me to work” (Shut the fuck up Henry) -- who mistake having a trust fund at birth as permission to be the most racist, insufferable white assholes in existence -- and who are also, at their core, just so stupid (Like braindead stupid. Like dropped-on-their-heads-as-infants stupid). Dick PeePee and his little gang of “intellectual misfits” (misfits as in dumb btw -- as in they should go back to kindergarten and redo their entire education because their IQ levels are nil) are privileged, snobbish, self-absorbed, and plain bigoted. 

Part 5: Your Problematic Faves Turn Out To Just Be Horrendously Mediocre People, Unfortunately

Now I must say, I do like stories where the main characters are not exactly likeable (i.e. Most of Virginia Woolf's books), but it was very obvious Tartt wanted me to at least be attracted to these people and find them alluring, but I simply never was. I’ve seen people stating that all the characters are morally grey and nuanced, but in essence they are just objectively deplorable people, I’m sorry. I think it’s a mark of your ignorance and delusion to say Dick PeePee and his entourage of xenophobic smartasses who couldn’t figure their way out of a Costco deli aisle are “ethically complex” or variegated in their personalities. Sure, they’re complex, -- Heinrich Himmler was complex to an extent -- but I can confidently say that they are also very much your everyday, run-of-the-mill 1% upper-class white suburban douchebags. Dime a dozen in the New England area. (As someone who’s spent quite a bit of time with the type of people that fit the same profiles as Dick PeePee and his pretentious friends, I will say that Tartt accurately captured a lot of how these people act, think, talk, and behave. I mean, if anything, at least their propensity for douchery were authentic!)

I could not at all ignore their truly shitty personalities because, very often, I and other people who look like me, were the butts of many of their snide comments and inappropriate jokes. Tartt’s writing, with its supposedly “hypnotic spell” that makes you “feel like you are reading this book in a dream-like lull,” never happened to me because it was just a condescending regurgitation of white supremacist and gatekeeping academic rhetoric. Henry, Francis, Charles, Camilla, Bunny, and Richard were -- from the very start -- horrendously one-dimensional, ignorant people so obviously desperate to seem smarter than they actually are because why the hell are you taking a postsecondary Greek language class this seriously. That’s not me being anti-intellectual or talking down on the Classics. It’s actually my deep respect for the field that’s making me question why these bruhahas were shitting themselves, pulling their hair out, and ugly-crying over as unserious a class as Classic Greek. Real, verifiable scholars in these humanities and art-related fields -- who I have met and worked with time and time again -- do not give a fuck and, if they’re really worth their salt, make it a point to repeatedly acknowledge that their subject matter is inherently absurd and shouldn’t be taken with so much solemnity. Because the ones who take that fake, manicured solemnity and use it to feed their egos are the worst pick-me losers who don’t belong in academia. Like yeah, I’ve had my hyperfixations, -- I took Latin for four years -- but I never thought at any point that I was intellectually superior to anyone just because I knew a little too much about ancient Roman customs. 

And another thing: They’re doing it all wrong. A great example is when Henry says the word “euphemia” means “cultic purity” so as “[t]o receive the god, in this or any other mystery.” Which is NOT TRUE?!?!??! The Greek word “euphemia” breaks down two words: eu, meaning "good," and phḗmē, meaning "fame," "report," or "speech.” It literally translates to "well-spoken," "good repute," or "speech of good omen.” None of that “cultic purity” bullshit???? What fucking are you???? Eastern Orthodox Christian???? Because they do have a concept of “euphemia,” but it’s because they recognize Saint Euphemia, who was a virgin martyr. How the hell are you gonna manifest Euphemia or even the transliteral idea of “well-spoken” by senselessly fucking one another in the woods whilst intoxicated and wearing 0.99 rip-off chitons?!?!?!?!?!? I was hysterical reading that part. I thought Tartt was gonna say, “Haha just kidding!” at some point, but no, no the trainwreck chugged on and I was strapped to the tracks. (DON’T EVEN GET ME STARTED on how WRONG and RACIST Tartt’s description of Tantrism is. I did an essay on Tantrism and how white people demonized it to fuel their Orientalist agenda back in my undergrad days and Tartt just 100% bought into that crackerism nonsense. Like bruh how are you this dense). 

Protagonist? More Like Pro-duce Literally Any Other Guy As the MC, I Am Begging You

Dick PeePee was also unconvincing as a male character. Too much about him screams, “I was written by a voyeuristic straight white female narrator,” like how he describes women’s bodies as “entirely unrelieved by breasts of any sort” and his illogical obsession with overthinking every little thing he does -- but always through the wrong angles. For example, he calls the partying lifestyles of his fellow classmates at Hampden “harmless” and “homey little” vices, which “fell somewhere below drink and above gluttony in the catalogue of sins” and “was somehow the abyss of depravity and dissipation.” (What are you, Catholic?) How the hell could you say this shit whilst also narrating that

“[a]t Hampden, [Beth] was thought something of a beauty but I loathed her lolloping, spaniel-like walk and her little-girl voice -- very affected, it seemed to me -- which degenerated frequently into a whine. She had also had a nervous breakdown or two, and sometimes, in repose, she got a kind of walleyed look that made me nervous.”

Like okay. Men will literally admit to being intimidated by women they don't even know and then choose to say the most unfounded, sexist things yet still expect you to be on their side because they have main-character “nice guy” syndrome. There was also that part where

“[a] terrible sweetness boiled up in me. Everything, for a moment -- mirror, ceiling, floor -- was unstable and radiant as a dream. I felt a fierce, nearly irresistible desire to seize Camilla by her bruised wrist, twist her arm behind her back until she cried out, throw her on my bed: strangle her, rape her, I don’t know what.”

Jail. I hate men! I saw someone who said that one of the “best things about this book” is that “the reader is Richard" because "I, too, miss my bygone days at my prestigious New England college with my whip-smart group of eccentric friends, and, like him, I am too quickly forced to realize the fallacy of such a feeling . . . After all, it was all a fiction . . . I miss living here.” And to that I say my good bitch I for sure hope you are fucking joking. 

Part 6: Hell Hath No Fury Like A Group of Dumbasses With A Simultaneous God and Victim Complex

Dick PeePee and his friends just made up a mind-bogglingly puerile cast of characters: aloof, self-absorbed and arrogant tryhard “intellectuals” who are obsessed with their (false) ideas of ancient Greece and don't particularly care for modern life because they can afford to (like when white people complain about how they were just “born in the wrong generation,” meaning they miss when slavery was a thing because, hey, the Antebellum period was so beautiful!), and also because this world doesn’t like them either -- and who can blame it! They're snobs with major interpersonal issues. Together, they form one of the saddest excuses for a “friend” circle I’d ever seen, and Dick PeePee agrees with me:

“At one time I had liked the idea, that the act, at least, had bound us together; we were not ordinary friends, but friends till-death-do-us-part. This thought had been my only comfort in the aftermath of Bunny’s death. Now it made me sick, knowing there was no way out. I was stuck with them, with all of them, for good.”

(I clapped when he realized this, btw. It was like when my straight friends finally put two and two together and see that their bare minimum fugly boyfriends aren’t “going through a lot right now,” they actually just hate women).

Strangely, I saw someone say it’s “almost understandable” that this “friend group” would be so “willing to kill anyone who might jeopardize” such a precious group dynamic, but that sentiment literally contradicts itself because in what world do you care so much about keeping your friend group intact that you kill one of them? That’s oxymoronic. Emphasis on the moronic. 

Bah. Just overall odd and idiotic, those main six. I’m not the kind of reader who needs to like the characters to enjoy the story, but I want them to at least be narratively interesting. I enjoy well-done villains with problematic, irreconcilably messed-up interior conflicts, but there were really none to be found in TSH. The six students felt like carbon copies of one another -- same build, different variations; cookie-cutter versions of the last guy.

To be honest, Bunny was the only one that roused even an iota of intrigue in me, but my interest sprung from plain irritation and an ever-growing belief that, yeah, the bastard deserved to be killed. He was an annoying whiny little bitch who couldn't keep his mouth shut, but he was also the only one out of the six who had a feasible reaction to his “friends” murdering someone. Yes, Bunny was deranged and a complete asshole, but he was one of the only two in the herd who really had any distinct personality. (The other one was Henry, but he was also a little cunt).

Which is why it's such bullshit that the only worthwhile characters both died. Their deaths didn’t even affect me beyond the standard, “Okay, I guess that just happened” reaction. In fact, their deaths were kind of comical to me. I know I shouldn't have, but I laughed way too hard when Henry killed himself. It was so random. He tried to play the doomed hero, and for what? To wrack up the Albemarle hotel’s cleanup bill? (So inconsiderate, imagine how arduous it must have been to get the stains out of the carpet! The poor innkeepers).

His death was highkey foreshadowed when Francis said, “Does it ever strike you, in a horrible sort of way, how funny this is?” Yes, it’s hilarious! I was laughing my ass off when Dick PeePee finally realized that Henry only told him what he wanted and never the entire truth, (Like, duh babe. You were always clocking in at the manipulation factory by being “friends” with Henry, I fear), but when he decided to confront him about it, Charles comes in dick out, guns blazing, and in the middle of all this chaos Henry commits suicide in such a melodramatic way.

And Now We Interrupt Our Regularly Scheduled Hating to Point and Laugh

This shit was genuinely goofy. Like legitimately bonkers. Here are some of the most batshit moments that personally had me hollering in disbelief over how bad it all was:

Dick PeePee’s first significant interaction with Julian’s “elite students” happens when they’re gathered in the library “sitting at a table that was spread with papers and pens and bottles of ink.” Which makes them sound very smart -- oh thank God, they have fountain pens! They must be scholars of the most exceptional caliber! -- but the hilarious part is that they’re all talking about how they don’t fucking know what’s going on. It's our first real interaction with them up-front, and they're basking in their own cluelessness. Which of course prompts Dick PeePee to swoop in and save their asses by giving his humble two cents, and him solving their relatively simple dilemma is what convinces them he’s talented and therefore belongs amidst their elite rank. That was easy! (Their entire first meeting reeked of Wattpad levels of cliché. It genuinely reads like pure satire).

Henry “disliked electric lights” and thus used “kerosene lamps” despite having all the money in the world and living in the fucking 1980s. At one point Dick PeePee also compares him to “‘bookish’ Clark Kent” because “why does no one ever see that . . . without his glasses, [Clark Kent] is Superman?” Like oh yeah. Yeah I can say things are like other things too. If my grandmother had two wheels, she’d be like a bike. Henry = Superman. Gotcha. 

There are a lot of instances where it felt like Tartt was playing dark academia dress-up with her characters, like when she talks about Charles and Camilla’s “not untidy” apartment but then proceeds to describe the very definition of untidy with its “[b]ooks stacked on every available surface,” “rich confusion of ties hung from the door of the wardrobe,” and tables that were “cluttered with papers” and also “littered” with “empty teacups, leaky pens, dead marigolds in a water glass, and on the foot of [the] bed was laid a half-played game of solitaire.” Sounds pretty untidy -- and unsanitary -- to me! But hey, if it sounds aesthetic, then it’s not really a mess, right? Totally not a sign of mental illness and poor hygiene. (Because when white people do it, it’s nouveau and charming; when BIPOC do it, they’re crazy and need to be locked up. The behaviors Tartt romanticizes on her white characters are the same ones others like her have used to demonize minorities time and time again. Really leaves a shitty, moldy taste in your mouth that not even Bunny's expired milk could wash down). 

Dick PeePee says, “If there’s one thing I’m good at, it’s lying on my feet. It’s sort of a gift I have.” And then he proceeds to efficiently prove he’s talking straight out of his ass because he absolutely SUCKS at lying -- which, ironically, attests to my point about the flimsiness and fundamental emptiness of his character. He thinks he’s good at lying, but that in itself is an egregiously false statement. 

All of the main six arbitrarily speak in Latin and/or Greek to each other as this “secret language,” but it’s so overblown -- and often miscommunicated; these fuckers can’t even understand each other most of the time when they speak in their “special code” -- that they come off as bratty children using oblique, made-up code words instead of actually trying to communicate what they want. It’s cute when kids do that; when it’s adults, it’s just plain sad. 

At one point, Dick PeePee -- and by extent Tartt -- wholly admits he plagiarized from T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste-Land.”

When Henry finally reveals that they were trying to “do a bacchanal” behind Dick PeePee’s back (Scooby-Doo style, mind you: Henry mentions, “We had to slip around to the back door, sneak up the stairs like cat burglars -- it was very tiresome, all that creeping around barefoot in the dark”), Dick PeePee naturally asks him hey WTF why didn't you tell me about this, so Henry exasperatedly declares, “You would have thought we were crazy.” As if they aren’t???????????? Y’all are out here chuunibyouing Maenads and hiding from Richard AS IF YOU DIDN’T INVITE HIM TO THE COUNTRY HOUSE YOURSELVES?????? YOU ILLITERATE FUCKS?????? YOU ARE THE GRAND ORCHESTRATERS OF YOUR OWN CONVOLUTED PROBLEMS!!!!!!! MY GOD!!!!!!!!!

Apparently after Henry fasted for three days a “messenger came to [him] in a dream.” Yeah, I fasted for three days once too and a messenger did also come to me except she was called Anorexia Nervosa and she told me I needed to get my stomach rehabilitated. No transcendental quacked-out visions, just a whole lot of vomit and a diagnosis for ARFID. Doofus. 

After they kill an innocent man -- on his own property, which they were trespassing on, by the way -- they just. Fucking leave his mutilated body there for someone else to find. (This inevitably bites them in their asses later, but their solution is to do it all over again -- but this time by murdering their friend and also leaving him to be found by some poor girl on a walk with her dog). And Henry is like, “[I]n retrospect, [just leaving] was the smartest thing we could have done.” NO!!!!!!!! NO!!!!!!!!!

In one of the many parts where Dick PeePee is very clearly alone in the dark in his room gooning to the thought of Camilla, he fantasizes about being “gently but manly” with her “as exordium to more violent pleasures.” But then immediately after saying this he burns his fingertips on a teacup like a little bitch. Yeah. Real manly. 

Near the end of the book, Dick PeePee starts fondly remembering Bunny’s voice: “[T]he lost voice, which has stayed with me over the years -- strident, garrulous, abnormally resonant, once heard it was not easily forgotten, and in those first days after his death the dining halls were strangely quiet without that great braying hee-haw of his echoing in its customary place by the milk machine.” Me when I homoerotically yearn for the crack addict noises my dead bigot donkey-friend would yeehaw and yeehoo till kingdom come by the milk machine, disturbing everyone’s mealtime and probably traumatizing the janitors who are not paid enough to work here. 

Dick PeePee also goes on to say some version of like, “Hm y’know what, looking back on all of this I feel like I’ve done Bunny an injustice.” You mean besides assisting in his murder? You’re doing me more of an injustice by not shutting the hell up and taking a bath with a toaster already. 

(I have more, but I need to lock in because this review is so long. I hate myself!!!!). 

Okay Back to Textual Analytical Bitching

I have no idea what the purpose of this book was besides presenting really vacuous, half-assed commentary on academia and privilege. Like what was the damn point. TSH is about a group of wealthy and pompous but otherwise banal college students deciding to commit murder in cold blood. The bare minimum course of action for an author would have been to have the characters look back on the why and how behind such an unthinkable act, no doubt plunging them into a lot of existential reflections on what led them to get involved in such a mess and what this all means about them as a person and a moral actor with free will. But that isn't the kind of book Tartt wants to write. She wants to write in a contemporary literary style in which loose, abstract ideas about the human condition are conveyed only implicitly through scattered, unrelated details, resulting in these overly tortuous descriptions of Dick PeePee noticing, for example, some shoes lying on the ground and talking about how the shoes made him feel (as if it’s profound), and you just want to say, “Okay, but so what? I can see that the lights are on in that noggin of yours, but is there anybody home? What the fuck are you trying to say about the shoes brother?” And sure, maybe I am dumb and "just don't get it” (I sincerely invite anyone to explain to me the narrative significance of these unnecessary filler scenes), but it really felt like Tartt was just smashing together incompatible narrative building blocks and rolling with it, improv-style. It's like she sat down one day and thought, “I am going to write a Very Serious, Very Literary, and Very Respectable novel about ordinary but not actually ordinary hot people committing murder,” and the result was . . . this. And this is bad.

The book feels so much like, as another reviewer delightfully phrased it, a “reductio ad absurdum of the conventions of mainstream literary fiction -- the gently controlled narrative voice, the 'deftly chosen' sensory detail, the distaste for essayistic digressions . . . at times I started to wonder if I was reading a parody of the genre.” Exactly. The writing definitely sounded nice, but it possessed zero significance. Good Lord, I got so sick of these kids drinking, chainsmoking, getting high, and then being so flabbergasted as to why their lives suck so quick. 

Furthermore, the ending via the Epilogue section is decidedly weak. Although, to be fair, I have no idea how else Tartt could have finished her book. A reviewer said, “The story does seem to be inexorably heading in that particular direction. Insofar as the ending reflects the disintegration that is going on in the characters' lives, [the ending] could probably be said to be appropriate. Still, I wish Tartt could have come up with something on a par with the rest of the book." ("On par with the rest of the book" implies said rest of the book set a decent standard to meet. Which it did not. Just to be clear).

There was also too much flat, useless dialogue, especially near the end. The story's climax occurs around halfway through, and the remaining pages are devoted to an absurdly long series of tacky, brainless plotlines that appear and then disappear every twenty-five pages. The subject matter of these storylines -- funerals, screaming fights, alcoholism, grief, incest, drunk driving, stealing drugs from someone's neurotic WASP mom, smoking pot and worrying the feds are going to catch them -- all feel so strained, lurid, irrelevant, and stereotypically "teenager" in comparison to the themes of the first half. (Netflix should've hired Tartt to write for Riverdale). It got to the point where TSH kinda read as a moralistic series of episodic case studies about "Dont Do Drugs, Kids!", which had been poorly superimposed onto the end of a totally different book.

Redeeming Qualities (Question Mark?) And Unimpressed Conclusion

Nevertheless, Tartt does have a solid talent for description. Her evocation of life at a small private liberal arts college in 1980s New England with its (unsavory) oddball mix of ivory-tower kiss-ass intellectuals and white-trash cokeheads is rich in detail, both vivid and almost satirical if it wasn’t so self-projecting. Tartt brought the setting of Hampden to its own kind of life, describing it as a “progressive school” who “love[s] the problem student, the underdog.” (Who these supposed “underdogs” of society are, I cannot say, for all I saw were privileged white kids soaking up mommy and daddy’s salaries to buy drugs, fuck forever, and kill people without consequence).

Tartt certainly knows how to play up the mythology of an institution, whilst also revealing the trickery and duplicity often needed to maintain such a grand reputation: “Hampden’s the last place on earth -- . . . For the worst people in the world.” (Charles and Camilla are the ones who have this dialogue, with the latter laughing like it’s not a metatextual jab at themselves). (Truly, if Hampden really is such a shithole, then it seems like the perfect place for those six clowns. A bona-fide moron gathering. The circus convention for low-ranking buffoons). As “a body,” Hampden is also said to be “strangely prone to hysteria,” with Dick PeePee citing its isolation as a possible explanation as to why its students are “more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally believed to be.” But it isn’t the isolation nor your so-called highly concentrated "educated" student body that's making you go berserk, it’s the campus culture of white supremacy. You’re all fucking cuckoo because white fragility is by default weak and intellectually degenerative. 

Sigh. From a stylistic standpoint, I’d say this book is, without context, well-written, hence why I reluctantly gave it 3 stars instead of my initial 0. There are many sentences (mostly long-winded paragraphs) that, if taken by themselves, look like they might have been from a book worth reading. TSH is often quoted because it occasionally has some good lines -- “Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it” -- but the ostentatious, austere style of the narration does not fit the subject matter, and, when it does show a faint promise, Tartt seems utterly devoted to sabotaging it before it can go anywhere, like the sequence where Dick PeePee microdoses the Ice Age as foreshadowing to when Bunny's dead body gets frozen over. (Yeah, yeah, character foils). I admit, Tartt’s writing in that section was impressive; it bordered on psychological horror and unreality, but when Henry showed up to “save” Dick PeePee at the end of it, all the magic was palpably shattered. (I wish we got more of Dick PeePee going apeshit in the cold. I found that part genuinely hilarious. I didn’t feel bad for him at all. He literally got himself into that mess; he didn’t need to put himself through so much senseless suffering, he’s not actually homeless and with no options like he pretends he is. It’s just his stupid male pride -- not that “fatal flaw” bullshit he keeps insisting on -- that gets him in these ridiculously unfortunate situations). 

So, in some capacity I do accede that Tartt has talent, and I do most definitely envy her above-average capacity for storytelling. (One of the few appealing aspects of this book that kept me going was Tartt’s purplish prose reminiscent of classic literature -- which, again, was still often more irritatingly meandering than narratively intriguing; like wow, she knows a lot of words! She mentions Henry’s umbrella’s ferrule like three times!). Regardless of this, TSH, like so many other debut novels (especially ones written by white people who went to college and opened a book on Ancient Egypt maybe once), is just too full of everything that Tartt wants to show off about herself. Like a green freshman who annoys everyone with their overbearing sense of brimming importance and unfathomable potential (with not much to show for it), Tartt wrote this book as though the world couldn't wait to read about all of her bottled-up angsty personal beliefs, arsenal of literary references, and niche metaphors that she had been storing up since she learned a few Latin phrases in middle school.

(I saw people saying they are “almost positive that [Tartt] cannot be a human being because she is such an exclusive enigma,” and I’m inclined to agree: I cannot fathom, no matter how hard I try, how people like Tartt exist because the military couldn’t even torture TSH's wack-ass plot out of me).

This book is a monolith to its own wasted potential. Some of the subject matter here is really interesting: the idea of trying to apply an ancient Greek mindset to modern world ideologies; the psycho-moral question of how a group of initially harmless (albeit imbecilic) people could be led to kill one of their friends; etc. But the whole thing is just so under-analyzed, so unclear about what its core values are even as it desperately wants to be a book about big, philosophical ideas. References to the difference between ancient and modern mindsets, or to various interpretations of the murder, are occasionally tossed out -- like cheap ragebait -- but they're never significantly developed; they drown in the ceaseless rapids of the pointless plot. An interesting idea will crop up every 50 pages or so (and that’s me being generous), but then Tartt will smother it with 150 more pages of binge-drinking and soap operatic side quests that read like inebriated wild goose chases rather than actual storytelling. 

To end, I'm not directly hating on anyone specifically for loving this book. Not exactly. I can definitely see why TSH is so popular, but as someone who has been in academia before and has studied Classics, Tartt's novel is nothing but an insult to everything it's trying to represent. I suppose I’m not overall saying TSH is inherently worthless and paltry, but a lot of the misdirected hype certainly is.

If you really want to immerse yourself in dark academia and learn about the things this book (inadequately) touches on, then do the actual intellectual labor of verifying the facts and deconstructing this overly-aestheticized lie people like Tartt are feeding you. Pick up another book (preferably one that's been peer-reviewed). Watch a documentary. Learn about the real secret history behind these subjects. Because once you do, you quickly realize that -- as is very often the case -- I am right.

Yikes. 

(You'll also, like, develop a deeper and more rewarding understanding of the many concepts and ideas you blindly idolized yet never really took the time to analyze until now. And that is, most certainly, more worth it than anything else that glitters in the world.