Donna Tartt's: The Secret History

This "readers guide" for Donna Tarrtt's "The Secret History" is thin on insight and value. While it is one step above "Cliffs Notes" in being both a summary and a "critical" work, it smacks of a first approximation of a better treatment that was then cut and slapped together on a thin budget and tight deadline. Literary criticism is a notoriously underpaid field (heck, folks posting here at AMAZON are giving it away for free), but still, readers are underserved by Hargreaves. Sad, for many of her observations and detail work teased out here have merit for discussion, and just as the reader is getting interested Hargreaves cuts off and moves on. Hargreaves first chapter "The Novelist" is perhaps most useful for the curious Tartt stalker (yikes!), for it is an adequate thumbnail biography and summary of author details appearing in print elsewhere but in previously uncollected form. This chapter has no original content. Chapter two is the largest section and covers "The Novel" with a topical breakdown of characters, plot summary, setting, and main themes. Hargreaves correctly identifies many of Tartt's structures and literary techniques and devices, but in her "Conclusions" section on page 62 misses the point of the work entirely when she bald facedly states "There are no moral absolutes in the world that Tartt creates in her novel..." demonstrating that Hargreaves has completely missed a recurring leitmotif in the novel: Catholicism. Two chapters follow to pad out the work: "The Novel's Reception" and "The Novel's Performance" the last of which smacks of sour grapes and left me curious why they were not simply combined into a single chapter. The "Further Reading" section is perhaps the best, for it is nearly an annotated bibliography, and includes very nice summaries of obscure Tartt short pieces. The useless "Discussion Questions" left me fearful of the level of teaching of literature that goes on in Hargreaves's world, for not a single selected question raises the issue of religion in the work. Considering the central event of the novel, this is preposterous and misleading. Anyone who reads and thinks deserves better.

The reason i ordered this book in the first place was because I was tired of only having the couple of pages that google books had available but honestly, those were only the pages REALLY worth reading. The Secret History is one of my absolute favourites and I will pick up any analysis of it but I thought this would provide me with so much more. That's not to say that this book didn't have a lot of interesting points, it's just that the section would end before it delved into anything substantial. Most of the analysis was relatively surface level, or at least surface level enough that I had drawn the comparisons myself when I was reading The Secret History. What kept me reading the book though was the explanations of references of books that I haven't read myself, or read a while ago like The Great Gatsby and T.S. Eliot's poems, and of course the included list of other books/articles you should read after The Secret History to increase your understanding of it. I'm kind of biased towards being interested in it because I love the original book and Donna Tartt so much, but I think you can get along just fine with the google books preview.

Since secondary literature on Donna Tartt and her novel is scarce, this book has been of great help to me by giving me an overview of most of the information one can find on The Secret History. It also gives a good summary and list many interesting features of the novel - things that a reader has to work hard for to find out/get a comprehensive list considering that this is a 700-page novel. Simple, but nevertheless interesting and inspiring for further thoughts.

Got this for my teen who is obsessed with the secret history. She loved it 🥰

This is an extremely slight little handbook--too limited to be of much use to the experienced reader, yet too expensive to justify its inclusion as a complement to Tartt's modern cult classic. Students who are at all motivated can easily get as much information through a few quick internet searches. I'm giving my copy to a student TA as a handy accessory for help in grading papers.