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Spotlight on the Elusive and Brilliant Donna Tartt
Donna Tartt might be one of America’s most mysterious contemporary fiction writers. The Pulitzer Prize-winning author rarely gives interviews, and when she does, she speaks little of her interests or routines. She also dislikes book tours, believing they detract from the very thing they’re meant to promote.
She was born in Greenwood, Mississippi, just a Sunday afternoon’s drive from the stomping grounds of Southern Gothic greats Faulkner and Welty. The Telegraph describes Tartt’s childhood as lonely. Her father was a “wild card,” her mother was “not particularly interested in small children.” Tartt threw herself into books and writing, entering literary contests and getting published by age 13. At the University of Mississippi, she was a reluctant sorority girl. During her freshman year, writer and professor Willie Morrisher noticed her preternatural talent and introduced her to Barry Hannah, who promptly admitted Tartt into graduate-level classes.
Tartt transferred to Bennington College in Vermont, where she rubbed elbows with other up-and-coming writers, notably American Psycho author Bret Easton Ellis, whom she briefly dated. While at Bennington, Tartt began her debut novel, the ecstatically reviewed The Secret History, published when she was 28. Tartt now lives in a quiet world all her own, where she keeps herself to herself and writes in a meticulous longhand method that seems fitting for the intricate prose she creates.
But, as Tartt says, “The books are the important thing.” She famously takes her sweet time completing her manuscripts (approximately a decade for each one), which combine literary brilliance with thrilling plots. They are as beautiful as they are frightening.
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The Secret History
Tartt’s riveting debut, The Secret History, is a reverse murder mystery—a whydunit rather than a whodunit. It centers around two homicides (one intentional, one accidental) and a group of elite, jaded New England college students who worship their Classics professor and insulate themselves from the real world while indulging in excessive amounts of alcohol, pills, literature, and Bacchanalian delights. Narrated by a lonely, lower-class California academic, Richard Papen, who dances on the periphery of this novel’s tight-knit Greek group before his eventual acceptance into the fold, it’s a story about those who live and die inside a bubble of boredom and brilliance. Sprawling and satirical, The Secret History set contemporary fiction on a new trajectory, proving literary elegance and riveting plot can coexist. It draws readers into a high-brow world without alienating them, with stakes as high a any 20th-century Greek tragedy.
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The Little Friend
Tartt’s sophomore novel also involves a murder or two. This time around, the pivotal death is the unresolved hanging of a young boy named Robin. Narrated by Harriet Dufresnes, the victim’s young sister, The Little Friend is a both poetic and horrifying (and delicious, and grim) whydunit, seeking to unravel the who and why of the killing. One sweltering summer, Harriet and her best friend take up the investigation, finally settling on their suspect: a backwoods, drug-pushing redneck named Danny Ratliff. Set in the arcane corners of 1960s Mississippi, this book reads like a page-turning thriller, while exploring a stark take on the ruthlessness of the world. It’s a propulsive story of revenge and grief with a sultry, Southern Gothic setting.
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The Goldfinch
This hefty, Pulitzer Prize-winning novel tells the gripping story of Theo, a boy who loses his mother in a museum terrorist attack and somehow escapes with his life in pieces—and with a famous painting, The Goldfinch. The plot follows him through deep grief, then bewilderment, then rebellion. Readers are taken on a dense and descriptive journey as he tries to rebuild his life, taken in first by a wealthy family in Manhattan, then by his dad and his dad’s girlfriend in Las Vegas, before eventually escaping to Amsterdam. The Goldfinch is a masterfully woven tale about passionate friendships and obsessions, post-traumatic stress and drug use, not to mention the dodgy underworld of stolen art and antiques. Simultaneously a suspense story and a tale of devotion, it’s an ambitious testament to both the mother-son bond and the rollicking desperation of white-collar crime.
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