A Somewhat Pretentious, Expertly Written, Crime Drama Populated By Some Truly Unlikable Characters

I really wanted to like “The Secret History.” I’d heard nothing but great things, and even had a buddy tell me that it was “my favorite book I hadn’t read yet.” So, when it won the Great Book to Read Next Lottery, I was psyched.

And, I mean, fundamentally, it’s a good book. It’s beautifully written, with Tartt being a total master of imagery, insanely knowledgeable about a zillion topics, and excellent at character building. The structure is ambitious too, with this murder mystery having the murderers being revealed immediately, and the rest of the book spent with showing us how we got there, then only halfway through starting on the repercussions.

But the thing for me was that those aforementioned topics, those expertly constructed characters, that fascinating structure, was just sort of … up its own ass, a little. (Granted, this is coming from a yet-to-be published author on his little blog, so who am I, but also that’s the entire nature of ShoBooVie, that it’s my egomania running wild, so whatever.)

In a nutshell, “The Secret History” centers on a group of five college students who are such brainiacs that they have their own class and course load entirely focused on Greek Classics. Tartt flexes some serious erudition here, and clearly knows Classics inside and out, but as much as she knows about them, we don’t know about them. (I didn’t know half the shit she was talking about, so maybe I’m just a lamen, but this just wasn’t accessible stuff.) And these five knuckleheads get the inspiration and great idea to try to have a good ole fashioned bacchanalia from these Classics, which leads them to commit an accidental murder, which leads them to commit an intentional murder, the subsequent cover-up and guilt driving the book.

But these characters are just miserable, terrible people. And not like fun miserable, like our pals the Roys on “Succession” or The Gang in “It’s Always Sunny.” They’re objectively just vain, uppity, spoiled rich kids who are totally oblivious to how to behave like real human beings. This made them just outright unrelatable to me, and almost unpleasant to read about.

And I think it’s that lack of relatability that made “The Secret History” a bit of a disappointing read for me. The premise is essentially “Five pompous elitist kids kill some people because they’re obsessed with a culture that no reader really knows about.” I don’t need books to cater to me (I mean Jesus Christ my favorite author is Thomas Pynchon, one of the most impenetrable authors ever) but between cultural topics like 2% of readers are going to know about, and characters 2% of readers are going to give a shit about, this one was tough for me to access.