The Little Friend: Donna Tartt

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Southern disintegration and decrepitude, families falling apart for the most various reasons -- fine stuff, surely, but almost all of this belongs in the background, the texture on which to build up a story. This lack of interest in politics is confusing, because one of her friends had described her as a "very political person".

I tell her that I've heard that, despite her size, she takes a drink better than any man (and it's pretty disappointing that she won't drink with me). The double standard of justice in a racially segregated community is subtly reinforced, and while Tartt's portrait of the maid, Ida Rhew, evokes a stereotype, Tartt adds the dimension of bitter pride to Ida's character. Danny knows that drugs were hidden by his brother, after the failed shipment, in a water tower where they are also discovered by Harriet who throws them into the water. There was a hellish screech and Harriet, opening her eyes, saw that she'd ripped the stuck wing off the bird's shoulder. His killer was never identified, nor has his family, in the years since, recovered from the tragedy.The Little Friend can sometimes seem more like a young-adult adventure novel -- Treasure Island with metaphors -- than the greater work its best moments surely warrant. The sudden, unsolved act of violence - the inexplicable murder of the universally adored young son - becomes the unreferred-to catastrophe which sends a whole extended Baptist family of grandmothers and great-aunts into displacement and grief. And yet, enticed by the book’s beautifully illustrated Bloomsbury Classics cover, captivating blurb, and the knowledge that I’d rated both of Donna Tartt’s previous novels highly (The Goldfinch so much so that I missed by tube station by nine stops while reading it), I left with The Little Friend in tow. Borges said that he loved Stevenson so much that he would not allow another book even to touch Stevenson's on his bookshelf, such was his reverence. Eugene Ratliff is often thought to be this because of his facial scars but is actually one of the more decent of the Ratliffs.

At times humorous, at times heartbreaking, The Little Friend is most surprising when it is edge of the seat scary. Asserting superiority over others is just a sad theme of human life that you see on the news every day," she says.They remember who recommended it to them, and who they were going out with at the time, and how they held their breath on the bus in to work, finished chapters walking down the street. The crime destroyed his family: it turned his mother into a lethargic recluse; his father left town; and the surviving siblings, Allison and Harriet, are now, 12 years later—it is the early '70s—largely being raised by their black maid and a matriarchy of female relatives headed by their domineering grandmother and her three sisters. Harriet's family is a weak but prominent presence in the book: the slightly unhinged sister, the lost mother, the absent father (living far away with his mistress), the aunts and grandmother. Mind you, it's difficult to imagine anyone taking the place of the real loves of her life, her dogs.

There's a horrible ethos in rural southern poverty that it's dumb to do well, it's stupid to succeed, and that people will laugh at you," she says. From the first pages of the novel, you are struck by her tendency to describe things in threes, in arching adjectival triplets. Parental Neglect: For most of the novel, Harriet's mother is depressed and functionally useless and her father is entirely absent. She has only one close friend, the annoying, blabbering but loyal Hely, with whom she shares some of her adventures. It is the summer of 1976, Alexandria, Mississippi, and they have managed to avoid being sent to camp.Likewise, Robin's murderer remains at large at the end of the book, as Harriet never discovers who actually killed him. She said that she used to support herself with a foolproof system for betting on horses - but then that could be myth-making," says one friend. The passage is telling: what an odd world Harriet must live in that here (at camp) she is confronted with this reality "for the first time ever". I would always prefer to go get another Dickens off the shelf than pick up a new book by someone I've not read yet.

I came back up a week after; it was a week to the day, and it was one of the scariest drives of my life. In the years that have passed since Robin’s death, Harriet’s mother has remained in a drug-induced slumber while her father moved to Nashville to escape his tragic past. Not Evil, Just Misunderstood: The fact that Danny Ratliff turns out to be this is a deeply troubling revelation for Harriet who believes she has brought about his death.Tartt also invests her with some odd precocity, capable of unchildlike sentiments such as: "Death, at least, was dignified: an end to dishonor and sorrow. It is hard to give an example without giving away the plot, but the scene in which Harriet kills a bird is more shocking than the scene in The Secret History in which characters kill their own friend. A tale that balances on the periphery of gothic horror, murder mystery, literary fiction and thriller, The Little Friends is a story of the South, that begins with the death of twelve year-old Robin, who is found murdered in his back garden – hanging from a tree – on Mother’s Day.