The Little Friend: Donna Tartt

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Joan of Arc had led armies when she was hardly older than Harriet. Yet, for Christmas last year, Harriet’s father had given Harriet an insulting board game for girls called What Shall I Be? It was a particularly flimsy game, meant to offer career guidance but no matter how well you played, it offered only four possible futures: teacher, ballerina, mother, or nurse.” when what she needed was something concrete, some small final memory to slip its hand in hers and accompany her—sightless now, stumbling—through this sudden desert of existence which stretched before her from the present moment until the end of life.”

I can tell you that The Little Friend (...) is overlong, its writing occasionally precious and its resolution murky; and I can also praise the book's vital characters, its supple conjuring of mood and place, and its dry, dark humor. But I can't explain how it is that this is a novel you sink into, or how Tartt casts her weird spell." - Laura Miller, SalonThe Little Friend is a 2002 novel written by Donna Tartt, following her immensely successful debut The Secret History a decade earlier. Tartt also invests her with some odd precocity, capable of unchildlike sentiments such as: "Death, at least, was dignified: an end to dishonor and sorrow.") She possessed, to a singular and uncomfortable degree, the narrowness of vision which enabled all the Cleves to forget what they didn’t want to remember, and to exaggerate or otherwise alter what they couldn’t forget; and in restringing the skeleton of the extinct monstrosity which had been her family’s fortune, she was unaware that some of the bones had been tampered with; that others belonged to different animals entirely; that a great many of the more massive and spectacular bones were not bones at all, but plaster-of-paris forgeries”

She takes writing very seriously, it's studiedly anti-trivial - "It's like what Melville said: that it's a writer's job to dive deep. And I've been under a long time." This slow and serious approach to fiction may be unfashionable, but it is surely a reason for her success. Barry Hannah, the writer who taught her at university, said that Tartt stood out because most students "have got really bad ears and minds, completely messed over by MTV. There's this generic tone. They forget what language can do. They need to find their own personal music." She'd heard the stories so often that she knew them by heart, could repeat them if she wanted, sometimes even dash in a detail or two neglected in the retelling [...]. The stories were familiar much as stories from her mother's girlhood were familiar, or stories from books. But none of them seemed connected with her in any fundamental way.” Robin's eerie death, Harriet and Hely getting themselves into some scary situations, and the final confrontation between Danny and Harriet hold one rapt. In seeking a reason for the delay since Donna Tartt last published, a prurient press has been keen to suggest all manner of explanation, except the most obvious. Surely, she simply wanted it to be good. Philip Roth and Jonathan Franzen have lately set the bar so exhilaratingly high for the American novel that you feel some sympathy for those of their daunted colleagues who no longer even bother to jump, but who instead just run along under and hope nobody notices. Door Stopper: The novel's excessive length has been cited as a detriment against it. The audiobook version, narrated by Tartt herself, is heavily abriged.Nevertheless, she has some interesting things to say about the American south, if more the south as a concept than the south of her home. "There's a horrible ethos in rural southern poverty that it's dumb to do well, it's stupid to succeed, and that people will laugh at you," she says. (This is superbly demonstrated in The Little Friend in the character of Gum, grandmother to the white, troubled, trailer-park family, the Ratliffs, and one of the most memorable monsters in recent literature. She stops her grandson from going to college and says things like, "My diddy said it was something wrong with any man that'll sit down in a chair and read a book." She also complains about having to do jury service because "nigger stoled a tractor" and adds chillingly: "In my time, we didn't have all this nonsense about a big trial.") Tartt continues: "Unfortunately, there's a big anti-intellectual strain in the American south, and there always has been. We're not big on thought. And it's worse for women, because it's always worse for women, frankly."