Like any good book, “The Secret History” begins with a conflict. Richard Papen feels he doesn’t belong in California. Sure, it’s where he’s lived his whole life, but from a young age, he’s felt that the sunshiny-polyestery-TV dinnerness of his everyday existence belonged to someone else. He’s embarrassed by his parents, moody and longing for escape. In short, he’s like every other teenager. But Richard, having recently graduated high school, secretly enrolls in Hampden College in Vermont. He’s been hiding a brochure for the school in his closet, like porn, taking it out to stare at pictures of the campus and the fall foliage. When he’s accepted, his parents begrudgingly let him go.

One thing Richard didn’t learn from studying the brochure is how cold it is in New England. Not just the temperature, but the people, too. Inadequately dressed against the Vermont chill, Richard makes his way around, trying to make friends and get himself into the school’s Latin program. He had studied Latin back in California, but the class here is full and not accepting any more students. After a failed attempt to plea admittance with the teacher, Julian, he instead turns his attention to Julian’s extremely select group of students

Comprised of Henry, Francis, Bunny and twins Charles and Camilla, the formidable group is known around campus as being strange and anti-social. When Richard impresses a couple of them with his knowledge one day in the library, they insist Julian invite him to class. Class, Richard discovers, is a bit unconventional. The students sit around drinking tea and talking philosophy or whatever they feel like discussing. Although seemingly unaffected by anything, the Latin students’ idolization of Julian is strong. They value his opinions and attention. They are also inseparable as a group, and Richard soon finds himself spending all his time with them.

Shortly after being taken under the group’s wing, Richard learns a horrible secret. But, so enamored is he of his new friends, Richard does nothing. He instead becomes more protective of them. He even agrees to take part in murdering Bunny, who has started to turn against the group, seeming on the verge of ratting them out. Henry, as the group’s “leader,” formulates Bunny’s demise.

“But how,” said Charles, who was close to tears, “how can you possible justify cold-blooded murder?”
Henry lit a cigarette. “I prefer to think of it,” he had said, “as redistribution of matter.”

Ultimately, Henry successfully convinces the group to kill Bunny. Bunny’s death is not a secret: It’s actually mentioned in the very first line of the book: “The snow in the mountains was melting and Bunny had been dead for several weeks before we came to understand the gravity of our situation.” Like Howard Norman’s “The Bird Artist,” the magic of “The Secret History” lies not in keeping things hidden from us, but in the beauty of the storytelling.

Although Bunny’s death is made to look like an accident (he’s pushed from a cliff), good old New England weather mucks up the group’s plan by dumping an enormous amount of snow over the body. They’re forced to wait for the thaw, as students and police circle the campus for Bunny.

Under the eyes of the law and the media, the Latin group’s once cool facade starts to show cracks. A cannibalization, of sorts, begins among the group, and Richard is left to struggle with the weight of what he has helped do. “And it may be a superhuman effort to lose oneself so completely, but that’s nothing compared to the effort of getting oneself back again,” Tartt writes.

Donna Tartt, herself having attended Bennington College in Vermont, does an amazing job of capturing New England, and her writing has a cool sterility. Much of what she says cuts from the page like the precise movement of a scalpel. You can almost smell the antiseptic. There are moments when Tartt is too smart for her own—and the book’s—good, but they are few and far between, and, like her characters, makes “The Secret History” beautifully flawed.

Written when she was 26, “The Secret History” catapulted Tartt into the literary limelight, spurring comparisons to Dostoevski, Fitzgerald and even Shakespeare. The overwhelming nature of fame perhaps stunned the author. Her failure to release another book for almost a decade led some to question whether she had, in fact, written “The Secret History,” until her much-lauded follow-up “The Little Friend,” in 2002.