by Donna Tartt, 1992
I read this book because it is by the author of The Goldfinch, which I loved, and which won the Pulitzer Prize in 2014. This was a page-turner, very dark in personalities and setting and plot. Six college-aged students, most very wealthy, are the sole students in a professor’s Greek class. The college, Hampden College, is located in Hampden, Vermont, where the winters are icy cold and snowy and dark, and all the other seasons, stormy and wet. One of the rich kids, Francis, owns a mansion in the country where the 6 go to drink and frolic on the weekends. One weekend, four of them succeed in going completely berserk – outside of themselves – which they had been trying to do secretly for awhile – and they accidentally murder a farmer – mutilate him. They leave him and drive home still wearing their bloody sheets. Bunny, one of them who wasn’t with them on this night, discovers the truth a few months later, and he is becoming a threat, so Henry arranges to kill him, too, by pushing him off a cliff into a ravine. There is so much angst and psychosis in these rich, godless characters.
I almost didn’t read it because I knew from the very beginning that it was going to be dark, but she is such a good writer, I couldn’t stop. The narrator was one of the six, Richard, from Plano, California, and he is such a likable character, and you are living the story through him. I learned a lot from him – it is okay not to answer people’s questions. It is okay to just be silent sometimes, or change the subject.
In the end, there is not the redemption that The Goldfinch had, but Henry, the main perpetrator, does kill himself, and the rest of them can go on, trying to make the best of their lives.
She is an excellent writer! In Yellowface, the main character mentions that Donna Tartt only writes one book a decade. That intrigued me, and The Goldfinch is on the best books of the century lists, and one of those lists talked about her prior books, so I decided to read this one. She is a very interesting author – no pictures of her on the books, no short bio.