Third reading
The Secret History begins with the revelation that the narrator and his friends have killed someone, before flashing back to the narrator's earlier life and events leading up to the murder. This is a whydunit instead of a whodunit.
The narrator, Richard, feeling out of place as the son of working-class parents in the blandness of California, escapes through financial aid to a small, prestigious New England college. He doesn't initially seem to fit in there, either, until he lands in a Greek class under the tutelage of a charismatic classics professor. His five fellow students are all eccentric children of privilege and wealth, and so Richard re-invents himself, lying about his family and past. As he desperately tries to be one of the group, he is drawn into keeping their secrets, leading him inexorably into complicity in murder.
This is the first Donna Tartt novel I read (also, the first she wrote), and I immediately knew her to be extraordinarily talented. The narrator helps commit a murder, and yet I felt sympathy for him because I felt that I understood him. It's a rare thing for an author to be able to make a reader hope for the best for a character who does terrible things, but Donna Tartt does it. In meticulous prose.
Tartt has written only three novels: this one, The Little Friend, and The Goldfinch, which won the Pulitzer Prize. I highly recommend them all.
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