If you want a book where the author is obviously impressed with both the sound of their own voice and their cleverness, definitely buy this one. Every page just screamed “I’m trying to write the next Great Novel!” as the writing dragged on and on. Time lost meaning reading this book; I’d read for 12 hours and cover 1/3 of the book only to discover I had actually read for 20 minutes and had finished 2 paragraphs.
The plot (such as it is), centers around Richard Papen, who years after the fact decides to tell the story of how the murder of Edmund “Bunny” Corcoran, a friend and fellow student from his college Classics course, occurred, and how this one event spiraled the entire group downward.
Richard, originally from California, moves to Vermont to attend the elite Hampden College, on a scholarship that he basically defrauds the college into giving him. Once there, he attempts to get into the Classics program, lead by Julian Morrow, but is denied because Julian handpicks his acolytes…I mean students.However, upon helping them with translation work, the other students vouch for him and he is admitted into the Sanctum Sanctorum known as Julian’s study. He joins twins Charles and Camilla Macaulay, Francis Abernathy, Henry Winter, and Edmund “Bunny” Corcoran. Julian, who demands ultimate obedience, has them all take his class and his class only., as he indoctrinates them into a belief in their Übermensch-dom and acceptance of returning the world to the values of the Ancient Greeks. When one of his “not sanctioned, but approved of” rituals goes wrong, the group determines Bunny has got to die.
What happens in the aftermath is the rest of the book.
None of the characters are likable or the least bit sympathetic; I guess they’re supposed to be written as slightly stylized real people, or people if they had their empathy chip switched off, or the horrors of higher intellect, or maybe I’m just grasping at straws trying to figure out a way that Tartt didn’t intentionally write highly annoying yet barely sketched out characters.
Julian is what my grandparents back in the ’70’s were afraid that all college professors were; rabid cult leader-like figures brainwashing their students into obeying their every whim, like Jim Jones with less grand-scale plans. Only in the end Julian is Caesar’s wife; he’s great in theory, not big in actually getting his hands dirty.
Francis is a stereotypical hypochondriacal homosexual; which is offensive, but I guess Donna Tartt decided that every group needs one. Charles and Camilla are the typical rich beautiful twins that exist in these types of books. And of course there’s hints of incest, and of course there’s a love triangle with Camilla, Richard and another character. Henry is the most devoted to Julian, the most amoral, and yet in some ways the most open to Richard out of the group. He is also a really bad take off on Sherlock Holmes; he doesn’t know that man walked on the moon because a; it’s on television and he doesn’t watch television, and b; if it didn’t happen during Ancient Grecian times, he has no desire to learn about it. Edmund you knew had to die even if you forgot his death was mentioned on the first page; he won the award of “most annoying twit of the book” 3 paragraphs into him being introduced. And Richard, our narrator; whiny, self-pitying, and never forgetting that he is the poorest of the group. Because of course all the rest of them are trust-fund babies, what else could they be? And of course Richard tries to hide his lack of wealth from them, because honesty is for other books.
I also loved the homophobia running throughout the book, like most of the male characters aren’t the largest group of gay men or bisexuals in denial I’ve ever read about.
If you were doing double bills of books like some theaters do with movies I’d pair this with If We Were Villains; two books about elite colleges, the not quite normal groups that form there, and the psychological issues that fracture those groups when one of them gets murdered.
This is allegedly the book that brought Dark Academia to the forefront of the public eye; if I was Dark Academia, I wouldn’t admit to it.
