It is better to know one book intimately than a hundred superficially.
Spoilers for The Secret History ahead
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We may have found ourselves entrapped in the busy midnight blues of October, and you’ll see this manifest in more ways than one. Picture a lit, mid-rise condominium building in the middle of a city. You can peep through its windows and witness that people move about their lives without pause; cramming a last-minute essay, bickering with a partner, sneaking into the kitchen to coat their mouth with chocolate. The world moves so intricately on its own that it got you thinking; one slight change in our mundanities may rear us into madness.
Indulging in literature that does the manic episode for you then might offer an escapist fantasy in what you may have assumed is a bleak or settled part of life– school. “A morbid longing for the picturesque at all costs”, a quote so irreplaceable for the young bookworms and established poets alike, Donna Tartt’s very first novel and Pullitzer prize winner, The Secret History (1992) best describes this innate obsession to have a symbolic life.
Despite the nonexistence of autumnal fatigue in our rainy summers, here’s a quick retelling of The Secret History to see why it’s a beloved and perfect novel for students and young adults. It has remained timeless, imbibing everything that makes up a quintessential October.
BUNNIES IN A BOX
If you’re well-consumed on dark academia content, you’d know The Secret History’s prologue doesn’t waste time seizing the shock factor of the novel. Starting off with its climax, we then follow in the first chapter with Richard Papen, a Californian and previous student of Medicine, bracing himself to the foreign cadence of Hampden, a liberal arts college in Vermont.
Soon, we read his inner monologues as he gets enticed by a certain cluster of students huddled religiously together, who we later find out are named; Henry Winter, Bunny Corcoran, Francis Abernathy, and twins, Charles and Camilla Macaulay.
The story progresses as Richard enrolled himself to the exclusive Greek course of Julian Morrow; a formidably charismatic professor with a great amount of wisdom and paternal charm. As the introductory parts of the story made its full circle, it turns out the five students he was intrigued by would be his only classmates in Julian’s class. And this officially webs the story of a slice of life, albeit kind of gothic with students whose idea of playing around is just chess or debate. Richard embarked on a new relationship with the quintuplet, and the readers become bestowed for the subtle hints of darkness inside his new friends.
BACCHANAL MOTIFS
The yearn to romanticize even the most obscene is the defining charm of The Secret History. For what seemed to be a rich life consisting of trust funds, old mansions, arguments about the dichotomy between Apollo and Dionysus, and drunk chess games in the middle of dawn, what lies beneath is the characters’ desire to remove themselves from this materialistic and pretentiously boring life.
The so-called spiritual conquest fuelled by their love of everything classic and Greek perpetuated the characters’ desire to be in one with nothingness, which led to a series of disillusioned and haunting plans of murder. As love and friendship get tangled in the process of ferocious bacchanals, gradual poisons, and belief in sheer luck, The Secret History will paint a psycho-analysis for what became these students’ recipe to justify a crime.
As the story progresses further into a dark route, we realize that what the characters of The Secret History conjured is, by their own admission, a way to enchant their lives in the most dramatic sense. With their calculating talents and belief in the occult, they attempted to eradicate themselves from the ugly emotional bounds of guilt, sorrow, jealousy and heartbreak meant natural of a human by doing something bigger than their egos; by conspiring death as the most symbolic and beautiful part of life.
BEAUTY IS TERROR
What makes The Secret History a classic is its dedication to stay what it’s supposed to be. It’s a story you can scoff at because of its sheer display of perfectionism and highfalutin conversations with Latin phrases. But why it’s so revered and became inspiration for acclaimed films like Saltburn and go hand-in-hand with Dead Poets Society is how this piece of art intersects fictional dreams with uncanny habits.
It’s fairly common to hear young adolescents’ answer to the question; “what do you want to be when you grow up?” to either be the best in my field, to be a character worthy of copying, or simply, be all or nothing. Tartt’s novel at its core confronts these very dreams; The Secret History didn’t fear diving deep into the unspeakable nature of immoral obsession that eventually led to fatal flaws.
I, for instance, have tried to pose a perfectly curated character for myself to show up as. As a student myself I wanted nothing else but to be taken seriously for my own thoughts, and there’s just something about reading The Secret History that made me feel smart, like I belong in their posh society. Taking a time to remember their world is almost a testament of my parting with school life, considering I’m already a college senior.
While their eventual demise is anything but fleeting, the book, in its entirety, is an intimate depiction of what student life is all about– oversleeping and missing an exam, subtle love triangles brewing in a friend group, and the frat parties that always ends with everyone feeling in disarray. It was able to be serious, tackling a mystery-thriller and yet be so personal, dissecting the layers of both our inner demons and moral compasses through love above all.
And so despite its cultish language and bible-esque cover, the point is straight-forward; it compels its readers to confront what they want in life.
Continue Reading: 8 Books That Helped Me Navigate My Life In My 20s
