Though The Secret History was published over 3 decades ago, it’s gone viral on TikTok. In 2022, #thesecrethistory hashtag had more than 229 million views. Almost every “fall recommendations” list features the mammoth 576 page tome.
Tartt’s 1992 debut is the foundational text of dark academia, a genre that romanticizes higher education and highbrow hobbies like visiting museums and studying leather bound books. As its name suggests, dark academia novels feature a scholastic setting and often involve gothic elements like moral ambiguity and murder. Examples of this trending hashtag range from the classic (The Picture of Dorian Gray) to the contemporary (Dead Poet’s Society).
But dark academia isn’t just a genre— it’s a style, a subculture. The dark academic has a penchant for plaid schoolgirl skirts, bookish blazers, and Doc Marten oxfords. They read Dostoevsky and dream of attending Oxford. The aesthetic conjures images of New England autumns and letterman sweaters.
Part of The Secret History’s enduring popularity lies in these aesthetic qualities (after all, who doesn’t love reading about crimson-covered campuses and tweed-attired trust fund babies?). But much of TikTok is overly concerned with the style rather than the substance of The Secret History. Rather than critically discuss the text, many simply romanticize the book’s stylish characters and aesthetically-pleasing surroundings. One TikTok imagines Tartt’s worldly students indulging in the trappings of intellectual life— chess, cigarettes, red wine— in a popsicle-colored country home worthy of a Wes Anderson movie.
I began to wonder: was The Secret History’s only appeal its aesthetics and atmosphere?
On a chilly day in October, I decided to pick up a copy and see if I could find an answer.
The novel centers around Richard Papen who enrolls at Hampden, a small elitist liberal arts college in New England. Richard romanticizes the East: the crimson foliage, the tranquil lakes. The East is the antithesis of his unglamorous California upbringing. Back in his hometown of Plano, desolation is the only distinctive feature of the landscape. Richard hates his hometown: the ugly tract homes, the endless freeways.
In contrast, he’s captivated by the charm of New England’s landscape. Hampden is as picturesque as a postcard, embodying all the cliches of Ivy League universities. Richard doesn’t choose Hampden for the rigor of its curriculum or its scholastic prestige— he mostly settles on the college because of a glossy advertisement. He’s instantly enchanted with the ivy-covered campus: the stately, Greek-inspired buildings, the light that reminds him of “long hours in dusty libraries.”
When he arrives at college, he envies his sophisticated classmates whose childhoods— he imagines— were filled with summers in Switzerland, private schools and English nannies. Ashamed of his lower-middle class background, Richard— in true Gatsby fashion— reinvents himself entirely. In this fictive childhood, he’s the heir of a prominent couple in the movie business— not the son of a suburban housewife and gas station attendant.
From the first line of the first chapter, Richard confesses his fatal flaw is a “morbid longing for the picturesque.” This obsession with aesthetics is what first attracts him to Julian Morrow, a mysterious classics professor, and his equally enigmatic group of Greek students. Richard is entranced by their erudition and elegance: Morrow’s “students…were imposing enough and different…they shared a certain coolness, a cruel, mannered charm which was not modern in the least but had a strange cold breath of the ancient world,” he says.
Morrow’s cliquish coterie consists of Henry Winter, a brooding intellectual who spends his free time translating Milton into Latin; Camilla and Charles Macauley, prepossessing twins who share a disturbing secret; Francis Abernathy, a gay man with a fondness for “beautiful starchy shirts with French cuffs” and “magnificent neckties”; and Bunny Corcoran, a less-than-intelligent, run-of-the-mill prep school boy.
After an intoxicating lecture from their charismatic professor, the class becomes obsessed with bacchanals, ancient religious rites dedicated to Bacchus, god of pleasure and wine. According to Julian, these ecstatic orgies offered a necessary outlet for our primitive impulses. When his students finally induce Dionysian madness, they accidentally kill someone in the process. Eventually Bunny finds out and blackmails them, leading Henry and the gang to kill him before he can expose their murderous secret.
Don’t get me wrong: Donna Tartt is a genius. Her plot is masterfully controlled, her writing is exquisite. However, I didn’t like A Secret History as much as The Goldfinch.
For one, the characters are profoundly unlikable. Not only are they heartless killers— they’re spoiled and completely insufferable. Throughout the novel, most of their behavior is preposterous, borderline unbelievable. None of the characters— not Richard, not Henry, not Frances, not Charles, not Camilla— seem to have any misgivings about brutally murdering their friend in cold bold. Can five ordinary teenagers really be such cruel, conscience-less monsters?
Though the gang undergoes a sort of unraveling after Bunny’s murder (Charles begins drinking excessively, Francis nearly kills himself), we rarely hear any of them express genuine remorse for what they’ve done. After pushing Bunny off a cliff (a horrific way to off someone btw), they attend his funeral and— in chillingly sociopathic fashion— spend an intimate weekend with his family without arousing suspicion or being wracked by guilt. It’s hard for me to believe that these characters, especially Richard, kids with no criminal record and no history of violence, could so coldly slaughter someone they once considered a friend and get away with it (even if Bunny was a racist/misogynistic/freeloading jackass).
Some might say this is exactly the point of Tartt’s novel: to show we’re all capable of barbarism under the right circumstances. But I don’t buy it. The conditions of the book aren’t enough to warrant the characters’ actions.
Consider the boys in Lord of the Flies. Circumstances explain their behavior: they’re in a terrifying life-or-death situation, stranded on an island unsure of whether they’ll ever be rescued or where they’ll get their next meal. There are no parents, no punishments, no rules. No longer constrained by civilization, they surrender to their most savage selves.
But what explains the brutality in The Secret History? Yes, Richard and friends are on a sort of “island” in Julian’s class, but they’re not completely remote from civilization (or its consequences). They don’t endure an unendurable situation; they don’t revert to their baser animal instincts because of a traumatic experience. As a reader, it’s difficult to untangle the chain of cause-and-effect. How do a few riveting lectures lead to such an appalling act?
Some argue The Secret History is a cautionary tale about the dangers of isolation. According to this line of reasoning, the characters are so insulated that they lose touch with reality. Because they only spend time with each other, secluded from other teachers, other students and other ideas, they begin to have a distorted understanding of right and wrong.
However, this argument never made much sense to me either. How long has Richard been taking classes with Julian? All of a couple months? What about Henry and the others? Maybe a year? Would it really only take a few months for you to lose your conception of right and wrong? to feel justified in committing murder? I can tell you right now: a few months with a mesmerizing professor would not convince me to massacre an innocent person or have an incestuous relationship with my own brother.
Are these kids the epitome of old money and entitlement? Yes, but does an endless trust fund and enormous privilege make someone a homicidal psychopath? If the message is that the wealthy have no moral compass and care little for human life, especially when that life belongs to someone on the lower rungs of the social ladder, why does Richard— a working class character— murder Bunny?
People like Henry and Frances grew up rich; it makes sense that they might be careless people who are used to smashing up things and letting other people clean up after them. But Richard didn’t grow up with that privilege: he doesn’t have a powerful father who can afford the best lawyer and bail him out of prison; his family doesn’t have friends in high places; he’s doesn’t always have things handed to him. Henry is the exact opposite. He doesn’t think he should go to jail for killing a common farmer; he feels entitled to killing Bunny because he might force him to do the unthinkable: face the consequences of his actions. It doesn’t seem plausible that Richard would possess the same sense of entitlement.
Speaking of which: why does Richard so eagerly go along with the gang’s plan? When the idea is first introduced, he seems to have almost no moral qualms. Callously kill one of my closest friends to conceal a crime I wasn’t even involved in? Sure, sign me up.
As a reader, I was left with one question: what in the everloving the fuck?
Richard barely knows these snobbish boarding school students, yet he agrees to murder for them? There’s no objective correlative, no logical explanation for why Richard behaved the way he did.
Julian’s behavior is just as inconceivable. After Henry confesses their dark secret, Julian flees campus and is never seen or heard from there again. He doesn’t report their gruesome crime to the police, despite the fact that he has a letter from Bunny in which he expresses his fears that Henry is plotting to kill him. Does Julian just have no conscience? You’d think he’d feel a moral obligation to report the homicide considering Bunny was one of his students. Are we to believe that Hampden is exclusively composed of the most terrible people on the planet?
Which brings me to another problem with the book: characterization. Only two of the characters— Bunny and Henry— had discernible personalities. All the other characters, even Richard, our protagonist, felt indistinguishable from one another. How is Richard different from Francis? What separates Charles from Camilla besides the incident of their sex?
The majority of the characters have little depth. While I was reading, I found myself hanging on to the most superficial qualities to tell characters apart (i.e. Francis is the gay one, I had to remind myself, Charles is the belligerent drunk, etc).
Not only are the characters as flat as cardboard cutouts, the book blurb is incredibly misleading. The back of my 2004 Knopf edition reads:
“Under the influence of their charismatic classics professor, a group of clever, eccentric misfits at an elite New England college discover a way of thinking and living that is a world away from the humdrum existence of their contemporaries.”
Though the back cover suggests a spellbinding professor will introduce Richard and friends to the mysteries of the ancient world and play a significant role in the novel, Julian is rarely present. He only shows up a handful of times in 500+ pages. It’s unclear a) what, exactly, Julian teaches them (save for that single lecture about bacchanals and “beauty is terror” business) and b) how such instruction influences them to commit such an atrocious act of violence.
We know the group becomes obsessed with Dionysian madness but how, exactly, does Julian stoke the flames of this obsession? It doesn’t seem like he advocates for drunken riotous revelry or completely losing yourself to irrational passion. Because we’re almost never in the classroom actually experiencing Julian’s irresistible charisma firsthand, it’s hard to understand how his disturbing philosophies lead the characters down their dark path.
Despite these many problems, readers continue to adore The Secret History, some going even so far as to call it a modern masterpiece. But as one reviewer cleverly notes, “vibes alone do not a novel make.” Many are so seduced by the surface of the novel— the cultured characters, the idyllic New England setting— that they don’t question the substance of the story. Perhaps we, too, possess Richard’s morbid longing.