Where to Start with Donna Tartt: A Reading Guide
Where to start with Donna Tartt — whether to begin with The Secret History, The Goldfinch, or The Little Friend. A complete reading guide to Tartt's novels.
Donna Tartt (born 1963) is one of the most celebrated American novelists of her generation — an author whose three novels, published at decade-long intervals, are each substantial works of literary fiction that have sold millions of copies while attracting serious critical attention. She is the defining figure of the dark academia genre, and The Secret History (1992) is the template against which every subsequent campus novel has been measured. Her prose is lush, classical in its rhythms, and deeply influenced by nineteenth-century fiction; her narratives are long, intricate, and constructed with great patience.
Where to Start: The Secret History (1992)
The essential Tartt — and one of the most influential American novels of the 1990s. Richard Papen, an outsider from California, is admitted to the exclusive Greek study group at Hampden College in Vermont, where five brilliant and eccentric students study ancient languages under the charismatic Julian Morrow. The novel’s first line announces the murder: we know who was killed and who did it before the narrative proper begins. What follows is the slow, meticulous account of how a group of aesthetically refined young people who considered themselves above conventional morality arrived at a deliberate act of killing.
The Secret History invented the dark academia subgenre — the aestheticisation of learning, privilege, and death in a rarefied academic setting — and did so with such confidence and psychological precision that it has never been surpassed in its own genre. Extraordinarily good on the texture of intellectual friendship and the seductions of beauty.
The Goldfinch (2013)
Tartt’s Pulitzer Prize winner — the most Dickensian of her three novels, tracing Theo Decker’s life from the moment of his mother’s death in a museum bombing through fifteen years of loss, displacement, friendship, addiction, and obsession with a stolen painting. The novel is almost 800 pages and rewards every page: Tartt’s Las Vegas, New York, and Amsterdam are as fully realised as any American fictional geography, and the characters — particularly the dissolute Boris and the dignified Hobie — are among the richest in contemporary American fiction. The most accessible Tartt for readers who love Victorian novels; the most emotionally powerful for readers who respond to grief and displacement as subjects.
The Little Friend (2002)
The most underrated of Tartt’s three novels — a Southern Gothic mystery set in a small Mississippi town, in which twelve-year-old Harriet Cleve determines to solve the unsolved murder of her nine-year-old brother Robin, who was found hanged in the family’s backyard when she was still an infant. The novel is deliberately inconclusive (it withholds the resolution that the mystery genre normally provides) and more interested in the atmosphere of a specific time and place — the American South in the 1970s, social class, the texture of childhood in a declining family — than in conventional narrative satisfaction. Less celebrated than the other two; deeply rewarding for patient readers.
Reading Donna Tartt
Tartt’s novels are long and require the kind of unhurried reading that her own working method suggests: she wrote slowly, and they reward being read the same way. Her central preoccupations — beauty, guilt, privilege, the relationship between aesthetics and ethics, the long consequences of a single catastrophic event — are worked through with remarkable patience and formal intelligence in each of the three novels. Begin with The Secret History; it is the most immediately gripping and the most perfectly constructed. Continue with The Goldfinch for the broader canvas; return to The Little Friend for the most introspective and atmospheric.
Frequently Asked Questions
Where should I start with Donna Tartt?
The Secret History (1992) is the essential starting point — a novel about a group of Classics students at a small Vermont college who commit a murder, told in reverse: the reader knows from the first page who died and who killed him, and the novel proceeds to explain how a group of brilliant, privileged young people arrived at this act. It is the defining novel of the dark academia subgenre and Tartt's most fully realised achievement. The Goldfinch (2013), which won the Pulitzer Prize, is the best alternative for readers who prefer a more expansive, Dickensian narrative structure.
What is The Secret History about?
The Secret History (1992) is narrated by Richard Papen, a working-class student from California who wins admission to Hampden College in Vermont and is accepted into the exclusive Greek study group led by the eccentric professor Julian Morrow. The novel begins with the revelation that the group has killed one of its members, Bunny Corcoran, and proceeds backwards to explain why: how six students studying ancient Greek became involved in a Dionysian ritual that led to an accidental death, a cover-up, and a deliberate murder. The novel is a masterwork of atmosphere, character, and moral complexity.
What is The Goldfinch about?
The Goldfinch (2013) follows Theo Decker, whose mother is killed in a terrorist bombing at a New York museum when he is thirteen. In the chaos of the explosion, Theo takes a small Dutch Golden Age painting — Carel Fabritius's The Goldfinch — and spends the next fifteen years haunted by it. The novel is a Dickensian bildungsroman, tracing Theo's adolescence in Las Vegas, his return to New York, his immersion in the antiques trade, and his eventual confrontation with the painting's history. It won the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
Why does Donna Tartt publish so infrequently?
Donna Tartt has published only three novels in over thirty years — The Secret History (1992), The Little Friend (2002), and The Goldfinch (2013) — and has consistently said that each novel takes approximately ten years to write and that she will not publish before it is ready. She has described her working method as extremely slow and deliberate, and has declined to discuss works in progress. Each of her three novels has been a major event on publication; the decade-long gaps have become part of her reputation.
