Every Donna Tartt Novel, Discussed
Celebrating the End of the Greatest Modern Literary Streak
Master Shelf: Donna Tartt
Reading and Ranking an Author’s Entire Bibliography
Donna Tartt, one of our most critically and commercially beloved novelists, is also practitioner of one of the greatest author gambits of all time. Tartt famously published one novel approximately every ten years for the last three decades. This is hardly an impressive speed, except for the fact that the author in question spent the ten year chunks meticulously chiseling exquisite sentences into masterful novels, starting with one of the greatest debut novels of all-time in 1992 and ending with her Pulitzer-prize winner in 2013 (we’ll give Tartt a bonus year for the Pulitzer).
Sadly, in three days we will lapse on the ten-year anniversary of Tartt’s last novel The Goldfinch. In honor of this incredible record, and to hoping that 2024 is the year our Tartt drought ends, we will be ranking and diving into one of our great living author’s bibliographies in our continuing series. Three novels doesn’t seem like much for this completist series, but each Tartt novel is a monster comprising a combined 2000+ pages (that’s 5-7 novels in another writer’s hands). Luckily, Tartt doesn’t make us wait for no reason.
In thirty years of being a novelist Tartt learned about the tax advantages of an Ltd.
3. The Little Friend (2002)
As with any author, the commonalities of a writer’s words and themes, their obsessions and fixations, become clear when the whole body of work is considered. The superstructure of each of Donna Tartt’s novel are nearly identical: each book starts with a murder (a friend, a sibling, a parent) that animates the events of the novel that follows, and each book culminates with a backbone of a crime and genre element that ties the story together. Yet what Tartt fits in between these two (extremely wide) chosen parameters is almost purposefully nothing alike from one novel to the next. Each novel differs widely in setting, cultural groups, the ages of the characters, and so on. The Secret History is an ensemble novel set on a elite college campus in the north east (based on her time at Bennington College); The Little Friend is a coming-of-age novel set, almost in historical fiction fashion, in Mississippi; and lastly, The Goldfinch, is a far-reaching character study, focused on one protagonist and his life across New York, Las Vegas, and Amsterdam.
By any standard The Little Friend, Tartt’s sophomore novel, is not a bad book or even a mediocre one. But, unfair as it may be to any successful writer, they create their own benchmarks and rating system as they produce art. By Tartt’s standards, she’s written one stone cold modern classic, one epic Pulitzer-Prize-winner, and then The Little Friend. But even if The Little Friend is merely a good or very good book, its flaws make it the most interesting to think and talk about, especially in the context of her other two masterpieces.
Ostensibly, The Little Friend is about the aftermath of the shocking death of a young boy and the ramifications it has on his family, and particularly his younger sister, Harriet, over one summer in Mississippi. The Little Friend is the only one of Tartt’s three novels that feels like a struggle to get through at times. For long stretches of The Little Friend Tartt chooses to expand and maximize every detail, scene, and chapter in a ruminative rather than focused manner. How Harriet’s summer collides with a poor family in town doesn’t become the focus until 300 or 400 pages in, with the faint emotional beat until then being the racism and classism inherit to Harriet’s Deep South upbringing. Donna Tartt seems to suffer from the sandbox she’s chosen to play in, as you can feel what is conventionally a 300–400-page coming-of-age story being stretched over a 600-page frame. For the only time in Tartt’s career this length is not entirely to its benefit.
What’s most fascinating is that The Little Friend is arguably the most ambitious and impressive in terms of style and prose of her three novels. Objectively she has no less talent, with plenty of sentences that flow effortlessly but also stop you in your tracks. It would be too simple—and inaccurate—to say that just storytelling or lack of plot is the issue with The Little Friend. There are Donna Tartt digressions in both The Secret History and The Goldfinch that are extraneous from a pure plot view that are essential and brilliant. The Los Vegas saga in The Goldfinch probably bored some readers who only care about plot, but this was easily my favorite part of the book. Likewise, there is a similar “trapped”, highly interior piece of The Secret History, a period that could’ve been 6 or 60 pages, but its feverish importance is sustained over the longer version Tartt chose to write.
The Little Friend therefore raises a thorny question about what exactly makes a novel “work.” It’s an impossible-to-describe quality that can’t be articulated in a thousand how-to-write guides. Every reader has had the experience of being slightly disappointed by an author they love and admire. Even a great novelist can not make the right choice from the outset, sinking time into the wrong idea, or simply get off-track in the process. Worth reading for the completist, I would suggest that readers tackle Tartt’s second novel last if they decide to read all of her books. And by the way—the blistering final 150 pages of The Little Friend rescues the novel in a big way and reminds the reader of Tartt’s singular prowess of merging the heart racing with the poetic.
The Debate: The Secret History (1992) vs. The Goldfinch (2013)
In three attempts Donna Tartt has done what it takes most novelists thirteen or thirty to achieve. Tartt’s hit rate is astronomical. The debate between which of these two great novels is the best speaks also to the breadth of Tartt’s accomplishment. The Secret History: set in a completely confined place where the intensity builds and builds between a small group of people. The Goldfinch: a globetrotting, time-spanning, operatic epic. The books are objectively equally matched when it comes to overall quality that the choice becomes what you appreciate as a reader more: a flawless novel in a contained package or a slightly messier, big, ambitious spectacle?
2. The Secret History (1992)
Discussed earlier this year as a modern classic, Tartt’s first novel has had so much influence, from genre, to style, to how publishers try to make writer’s careers happen. The Secret History follows a middle-class striver Richard Papen, who comes to an elite college and falls into a tight relationship with his Classical studies professor and the other five wealthy students their professor handpicks alongside Richard for his exclusive class. Paralleling their studies, this group becomes too close and, as you know from the first page, it’s a relationship that will go too far, ending in one of the students being murdered.
Inarguably, The Secret History will always be more influential than The Goldfinch. But most importantly to point out here again is that The Secret History gave writers for generations upon generations permission to write. Tartt, in her 20s, took a common experience that many people have—going to college—and showed that even young people had thoughts and life worthy of turning into art. Bad and mediocre books often make writers aspire to write (“I could do better than that”). Good books depress writers (“How could I ever do that?”). Truly transcendent books like Donna Tartt’s The Secret History inspire writers to write. It doesn’t matter if equaling Tartt is impossible for nearly anyone, as the combination of writing and storytelling in The Secret History is inescapably and intoxicating, making you fall in love with the possibilities of words and the magic of novels every time.
1. The Goldfinch (2013)
Although each of Tartt’s novel have essentially the same opening—a murder—what she does in a in one page in The Secret History and in a short prologue in The Little Friend becomes an operatic and breathtaking opening flashback in The Goldfinch at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. In harrowing fashion, thirteen-year-old Theo Decker comes into possession of the classic painting that the book takes its title from, which will go on to shape his life in profound ways. The Goldfinch is a modern realization of the Greek tragedy we know Tartt is obsessed with from the themes of The Secret History: how a singular, spectacular event can affect the fate of one person. Tartt manages to blend her trademark craftsmanship and level of minute detail seen in The Secret History and The Little Friend onto a massive canvas in The Goldfinch.
In ranking The Goldfinch #1 of all Tartt’s novels we must circle back to the impetus for this list: Donna Tartt’s ten-year itch. If an author is going to intentionally write slowly and work over a novel for a long time, you want The Goldfinch to be the end product. While The Secret History will always win more points for influence and originality, The Goldfinch attempts to be in the company of classics from Homer’s The Odyssey to Dostoevsky’s Anna Karenina, and even reaches those heights at times. Parts of the fairly-criticized final third of the novel keeps it from being a perfect book, but the pieces of The Goldfinch that sing were worth the decade in waiting. As we come up on 11 years since The Goldfinch was published, we can only hope that another Goldfinch is on its way next year, or maybe, if we’re lucky, Tartt has stretched her book-every-decade literary streak once again in order to attempt something that’s even more grand.