Tom's Two Cents: Donna Tartt's Second Novel, The Little Friend

Donna Tartt achieved book fame this past year with her third novel, "The Goldfinch," being awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.  I reviewed it in this column back in December, not knowing that it had polarized the critics, or at least divided them between the mainstream and the so-called "literary" critics, who seem offended that a blatant best-seller could also be a literary success and win the Pulitzer.  Well, I was a bit surprised that it won the Pulitzer, but I'm certainly not about to join the anti-Tartt Club.  I think she is a fascinating writer with loads of talent.  The fact that she has written only three novels since 1992 clearly indicates to me that she is a serious writer, not aiming for a mass market, else, with her ability, she'd be grinding them out like sausages, or like, well, Danielle Steele.  Her first novel, "The Secret History," which I've also read, proved also to be a runaway success, more so than "The Little Friend," which seems to have disappointed reviewers and her already substantial reading public.  I'm kind of not surprised.

"The Little Friend" begins with a brilliant, mind-blowing chapter that I'm not sure the rest of the novel lives up to.  It's one of the best first chapters I've ever read, one, I think, that would be difficult for any writer to top, and therein, perhaps, lies the problem: where does one go from there?  Well, Tartt doesn't have any problem going, but it seems to me that she sort of goes all over the place, creating the air of a murder mystery novel, with a twelve year old girl, the amazing Harriet Dufresne, playing "detective," supposedly solving the murder, then unpredictably not solving it, with the author going into the persona of the supposed murderer, only to have the reader discover, as Harriet does later, that he didn't "do it" after all!  Though much of the novel seems like another Scout/Dill romp, it turns deadly serious and virtually catastrophic in the end, with our young heroine almost killed and the supposed killer (who now really IS a killer!) amazingly surviving amidst a series of improbable events that would do credit to a mainstream thriller.

If all this suggests that at times the narrative takes on the character of a young adult who-done-it, perhaps it does.  Donna Tartt has the enviable capacity of mixing the intellectual, the superficial, the ordinary and the mysterious into a gigantic and intoxicating brew, filled, at least in this work, with some fascinating Southern character types, both White and Black, high and low, proper and pernicious.  One of her special talents is to provide settings of such authenticity that one would think she has experienced everything from the highbrow art/antique world ("Goldfinch") to the old fashioned Southern small town mystique ("Friend") to the sacred halls of New England Academia ("History"), at least the latter two of which she has.

Finally, I would say that "The Little Friend" is not a mainstream murder mystery, because it ends, after some 600 pages, with the murder still unsolved.  Could a real mystery writer ever possibly get away with that?