“A new student at a Vermont college is drawn into an exclusive Greek-studies seminar and the murder that the small clique conceals.”
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The Secret History is Donna Tartt's 1992 debut novel, the 559-page literary thriller that defined the dark-academia register a generation before the term existed. Richard Papen, a working-class California undergraduate who has transferred to the small Vermont liberal-arts college Hampden, finds himself drawn into an exclusive Greek-studies seminar of five students taught by an enigmatic professor named Julian. The seminar is unusual. Then the murder happens. The novel is not, contrary to its marketing, a whodunit. Tartt tells you who did it on the first page.
What Tartt is interested in is not the murder but the aftermath: how a small group of intelligent, classically educated, almost-but-not-quite-decent people come to live with what they have done. The Hampden setting is a fully realized fictional college (Tartt drew on her Bennington years), and the supporting cast (Henry Winter, Bunny Corcoran, Francis Abernathy, Charles and Camilla Macaulay) carries the kind of mythic weight literary fiction occasionally manages. The prose is one of the best contemporary American sentences; the patience of the novel is one of the rarest contemporary American virtues.
Recommended as the canonical contemporary dark-academia novel, as the source text for the M. L. Rio / Susan Hill / R. F. Kuang descendants, and as required reading for anyone who has been told they would love Brideshead Revisited. The 27-hour audiobook narrated by Donna Tartt herself is excellent. Five stars without reservation.
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