The Secret History by Donna Tartt

20:20Jeff:And she grew up in Mississippi, and she's coming out of this grand tradition of Southern Gothic writing. You know, in addition to memorizing a lot of poetry as a kid, she starts writing poetry at the age of five. She has her first poem published when she's 13. Like, she is something of a child prodigy. The idea of her going off to the University of Mississippi and pledging Kappa Kappa Gamma completely blew my mind. Yes, you can't make it up. Friends, if you have not seen a picture of Donna Tartt, please Google a picture of Donna Tartt and then square it with the TikToks of like Bama Rush. and just take a few deep breaths.

20:59Jeff:She is about as literary as it gets, as big a book nerd as you were saying, Jeff, as a person can possibly be. And all of that goes into the stew that makes this book, which itself is really Gothic. It's like you move a Southern Gothic into rural Vermont and this is what you get. And I think it's important to the backstory. And I had forgotten this. I read a couple of pieces on her and watched a couple of interviews, and I'll have some more sort of direct commentary on the nature of those interviews in a little bit. But one of the things I was struck by, and you may be hearing us say all the stuff about book nerds and the Greeks and the classics.

21:37She really prioritizes the pleasure of the text, to read something that you enjoy reading. She's talking in this Charlie Rose interview about like, I don't want, you know, Faulkner, of course, Todd at Ole Miss, would weigh heavy on someone who's a Southern writer. I admire what he does. I've looked at it technically, but not really one of my guys because I just don't enjoy it, frankly. And one of the reasons this was a big deal, I can totally see why people were excited about it, because it reads great. It is a page-turning thing with a lot of other stuff going on. It's not just that. It is, and one of my questions is, was this the beginning of literary genre?

22:16What precedes this? This is a mystery that's literally, but also specfic, which we can talk about because there is a supernatural element here, even if it's off the page. And the way she manages the Bacchanal is fascinating. But like, it's really like this is what we would call a four quadrant book in a lot of different ways at this point.

22:37Jeff:It is. You know, I had a true book nerd moment preparing for this episode because I sat down with my original copy of The Secret History like seven o 'clock last Friday night, opened it up. Too many notes from myself 15 years ago in that copy. And I was like, oh, we got to I got to get a fresh one. So I ran down to Barnes and Noble and I was delighted to see that The Secret History had a shelf talker and the shelf talker at my local Barnes and Noble reads. This is the OG of dark academia. I don't read it. I mean, I think that's worth talking about. Like, this is something that feels like the fountainhead of other things.

23:14But we read Katabasis by R.F. Kwong this year, which is also the most modern, highest profile, shiniest version of it. And it's so far afield from this that it's almost hard to call it the OG thing. I guess on that moment, we're talking about individual copies. Let's take a moment to take Thrift Books, who's sponsoring season one of Zero to Well Read, because this book has been in print and I have here my original copy which you can buy this is a first edition but weirdly it says second printing before publication so they were printing more copies before publication to keep up with anticipated demand this one's in pretty good shape as far as I could tell if you want this one it's like fifty dollars but you can get first editions with this really beautiful cover that are like seven bucks weirdly the first paperback edition is more expensive to get like it can be thirty bucks but then you can get modern paperbacks for four or five dollars.

24:06So thanks to Thrift Books. Go get yourself a copy. The other thing to talk about this is they were trying to make this special in a couple of interesting ways. It's this weird ass format. I don't even know what this is called, but it's a taller, skinnier one. Can you see? Oh, is it a hardcover? It's a hardcover, yeah. It's a chip kid design early in his career who's gone on to become maybe the most famous cover designer of our lifetimes for sure. Sonny Mehta was the editor who acquired this book for Knopf. $450 ,000 advance, which is about$1.1 million today for a debut. Like you just don't hear about this kind of thing.

24:42From there, we'll start folding in some more tart and backstory because I think it's worth talking about in the course of the book. I think we're ready to talk about our own first reading experience, Rebecca, while we've got our own books in our hot little hands. How did you first come to The Secret History before you had to rebuy it because your earlier self was too discursive in the margin?

25:00Jeff:I first read it in my early blogging days. I think it was 2008. I don't have any idea what specifically prompted me to pick it up. But I remember that people were talking about it on Twitter. Twitter was good back in the day. If you are a younger person and you've never experienced good Twitter, literary Twitter was great in like 2008 to like 2013 or so. And they were talking about it in a way that I thought it was a new book. and I went and picked it up and realized this book was 15 years, 16 years old at the time. I packed it for a trip to my in-law's house over Thanksgiving and I have a really vivid sense memory of sitting in their living room while the house was full of people and just being completely absorbed and just turning the pages.

25:51Jeff:And that's one of the things that makes this book so special. One of the early, one of the blurbs, one of the reviews that's listed in the praise for the secret history in my paperback copy calls it an erudite page turner. Another one calls it a thinking person's thriller. A great, dense, disturbing story wonderfully told. It's to me the ultimate marriage of highbrow and lowbrow. And that is the feeling that I had reading it of like, this is so smart. And it is such a just a great page turner. And you very rarely get both of those things in, in one book. I know that I've read it once since then.

26:29Jeff:I don't remember when or why I just picked it up and reread it. It had been long enough that I had forgotten some of the more interesting details. It and it feels so fresh. This is a fun book to read for the first time. I envy you. If you're listening to this and you have not read this book yet, I'm jealous that you get to go read The Secret History for the first time. It's really enveloping. It's long, we should say 600-ish pages. I can't remember the page count. Yeah, the paperback is like 560, something like that. Is there a version that's 70 pages shorter? I felt in this subsequent reading a couple of shaggier spots, but I didn't care.

27:07I mean, it's not something that I really cared about.

27:11Jeff:And you have in the notes here that this was a random pickup of your life, but you have a first edition. So how did that happen? I acquired this first edition in the fall of 1994. Okay. So my current partner and I were not dating yet, but we were really good friends. And I went with her to go visit her grandparents in Arkansas for the week. We stayed down there. Were we dating already? Anyways, 94, 95, somewhere in there. and I had read all the books I had brought so I'm looking at their shelf their retirees in Hot Springs Arkansas lovely people but I'm not going to them for book recs if you're what I'm saying and they had this book on the shelf see this copy and I'd never heard of it I wasn't at 1450 reading contemporary I mean this was essentially contemporary at the time I was like doing some older stuff I was getting my you know classic sort of sorted out I told the story before of getting Thomas Hardy in my Easter basket when I was 13.

28:07Like, that's how insufferable I was. So I wasn't reading this, but I was looking for something to read, and it caught my eye, and I was like, oh, it's about the classics. It sounds great. I read five pages, and then that was what my next two days were about at that point. It was really striking. I can only imagine, I wish I would have thought, if I now could ask them, I'd love to know why they picked it up. I think it was just a round. Maybe someone gave it to them. Maybe they were looking for a thriller or something. Maybe someone who was visiting them left it there. It's a great question. I think it was enough.

28:42There were enough copies, enough hype that it could just sort of get onto someone's shelves that even had a glancing interest in books. It was around. It was a big – these giant Vanity Fair profiles and GQ and L, like all over the place. Charlie Rose, like I said, it was – she was, and this book was a huge, huge deal.

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30:14Jeff:Like the first, just let me just, I'll just read the first sentence to our listeners here. The snow in the mountains was melting and Bunny had been dead for several weeks before we came to understand the gravity of our situation. You just, you get the atmosphere. This book is so atmospheric. You get what's happening, the situation these characters are in. And it's just from there, you're just off. You're off to the races. This is long. I think this is it's a feature, not a bug that the book is long. I also don't care if it's shaggy in places you want to spend as much time as possible in this world that Tarte creates.

30:54Jeff:and with these characters that are really, like nobody here is likable. So the fact that you want to spend 600 pages with them and that it's such pleasure is really an astonishing feat she's pulled off. Yeah, and I think that gets into what it's like to read this and what's it about because they do go hand in hand to a certain degree. I found myself, so the moments of tension, since we know that Bunny, one of their peers, and part of their inner coterie is murdered by the group or some faction of them. We don't exactly know who or what the circumstance is. There's tension built into it. But then the first part of the book kind of relaxes into Richard's experience of, you know, his own little bit of a backstory where he come, not unlike Donna Tartt, he's sort of from the territories, right?

31:42Like he's not from New England. He's not of these world, of these people are from. He's from California, sort of hardscrabble, suburban working class. Things are not great there. Donna Tartt also doesn't talk about her family. It's just off limits, so it's hard not to draw the parallels there, but comes into this world. And one of the pleasures, not unlike Ethan Hawke in Dead Poets Society, is entree into this world that so many of us—oh, I'm knocking stuff over. I'm so excited—that so many of us who care about books and reading have this idea of what the college experience can and maybe should be in a dreamlike experience, in which you are.

32:19you meet your people, you get to engage with the ideas you want to engage in, you feel like you're coming into your own, you're taken seriously by other people, especially adults who have PhDs or whatever. But hanging over that, as Richard, we have that it's not going to be great. Like, something's going to happen. And no spoilers for Dead Poets Society, and this is in my house, take later. How different would that book be if we know that Robert Sean Leonard dies at the beginning. It'd be so fascinating. I don't want that. I want Ode to Joy and I want all that unalloyed for me personally. But it's so fascinating to see that over this really rhapsodous, rapturous moment, and there's some quotes like, this is as close to heaven that Richard can imagine.

33:06And some of the characters say, we just want to do this forever. We want to live together in this house and the farm and read our Greek and drink our gin and this is just it forever. but the storm clouds are on the horizon and that's what you're there for is to meet these characters and these relationships it's you have the note here that it's super gatsby in this way and there's lots of ways like gatsby's you know it's mentioned directly but richard observing the relationships between these people i think is my favorite part of this book the classic stuff and the murder stuff But like Tartt's vision and the way she is having him see and trying to understand and not understand and holding those things together.

33:46That's kind of, for me, some of the more magical stuff.

33:50Jeff:Yeah. He's one of the ultimate POV characters in modern fiction, I think. Like he tells us things about himself, but he also tells us up front in not so many words that he's an unreliable narrator. that he's good at making people believe what he wants them to believe about him, that he can insinuate himself into and shapeshift into situations to kind of have the social connections that he wants. It's a very Gatsby-esque there, but also kind of Nick Carraway in Gatsby-esque, because we don't really care about Nick in the story of Gatsby. We just care about this world that he's opening up for us.

34:27Jeff:And it is the feeling that the world is opening up. that Richard Papen captures here, that Tartt captures, if there were an adaptation, and we will talk about all of those ifs later, there would be an incredible montage scene of the first month of school here, where the leaves are turning in Vermont, and everybody's wearing their black turtlenecks, and he is sitting around with these people that he thinks are smart and beautiful, and he admires them, and there is nothing better than them admiring him while they swirl their wine around and talk about the great works and go for a walk in the woods.

35:06Jeff:And it's just this elevated kind of life that he has been looking for that so many book nerds grow up hoping we will find. And that frankly, doesn't usually exist. We talk all the time on the Book Riot podcast and we joke about it on this feed that that literary dinner party that you're afraid of getting invited to because someone's going to ask for your take on Dostoevsky doesn't really exist. Those don't happen all that often. But Donatark creates that world for these characters and then lets us see all of the ways that this dream, and he says that directly. It feels like there's something not quite real about any of it.

35:46Jeff:It's something like a dream, but it becomes quite a nightmare. The feeling of reading long stretch of the book, And it's by turn more or less lucid in terms of how dreamlike. There's a lot of direct dreams, but there's a lot of visions, fantasies, and things like that. But the element of the dreamlike, the element of accessing the unreal, the surreal, the irrational, is not just a reading experience of a real reader, but it's something the characters themselves are interested in. Because what eventually happens, as we said, And the book even sort of glances over it, but it is the central event of the book is that these characters, and unbeknownst to Richard, he finds out later, have been trying to replicate the ancient Greek—it sounds nutty even to say it out loud, Rebecca, in a synopsis way—of a bacchanal, of a wild, sort of orgiastic, divine, speaking in tongues moment.

36:44That is, you get outside of your mind and yourself and you access some other force, Dionysus, Bacchanal, and he finds they've been trying to do it. And eventually they do it. We're led to believe, and Richard gives us no reason to doubt, it is not really at stake in the book that this actually happened, that some surreal thing happened. They went outside their bodies. The trees started twisting and snakes were coming and maybe Pan was there. They all believe it. Richard believes it. it is not given to the reader to say that did not happen, which is amazing.

37:18Jeff:I disagree with you that they succeed in like summoning Dionysus. I have always read this because they mentioned drugs directly on the page as like, these are hallucinogenic trips, the kinds of things they talk about seeing. And they talk about how intoxicated they are. Well, I mean, again, you can interpret however you want, but they make clear that they tried drugs first and it didn't work and they were on a purification ritual to get into this state we might doubt it but there's nothing in the text that like richard's like did this actually happen like the care he and those other characters believe that something happened and in that state they accidentally kill like a hunter or farmer that sort of happens across them in the woods and they cover it up and that cover and in a gnarly way it sounds it's not just like somebody gets startled and hits him over the head he's like disemboweled disemboweled like something something why something legitimately wild happens in that moment and then from there the person who wasn't there richard came to this late he he wasn't admitted into inner circle yet but bunny crucially wasn't there one of their members was somewhere else he'd been kind of on the outside looking in himself and finds out through you know mechanisms that don't really matter to us here that this happened and then holds it over some members of that group he finds it hard i think he's having a hard time dealing with himself frankly bunny like how to as a person should as a person should and then eventually they realize their own freedom is in jeopardy and they decide collectively and they do so collectively go out to push bunny off a ledge and dies and that's halfway through the book essentially like that takes us up to sort of halfish way through the book the back half of the book is the ramifications the paranoia the cover up, them trying to get through this police investigation, them trying to deal themselves with what's going on, the fraying of the relationships that happens because of their own tensions, anxiety, their separation, ostracism basically from the teacher that they cared.

39:24The center does not hold. And then you get to fall out from there.

39:28Jeff:It's like a great platonic ideal of a campus novel in the first half. And then the second half is like modern Poe. Like, that's where it really goes gothic. Everybody's cracking up. Like, it's descent into madness. And their relationships are falling apart because of this tension of can they keep the secret for about the first murder and then the secret about killing Bunny? Everybody's drinking too much. Charles and Camilla, the siblings who sleep together, have a falling out because Camilla is also getting with Henry. Like, side note, don't ever be the only woman in a group of dudes like this.

40:08It's a bad plan. Apparently Tartt was. I mean, she didn't have this experience and she didn't present like Camille at all, but she knows of what she speaks about being the only woman in a small, sort of emotionally incestuous, if not actually incestuous group.

40:20Jeff:And they all suspect each other because they're worried that somebody is going to crack up and tell the cops or Julian or some authority what happened. They're worried about who's not going to be able to hold the secret. And then, of course, drinking a lot and doing a bunch of drugs make you less capable of keeping your shit together and keeping your secrets intact. And it all just all the threads start to fray. It feels very like telltale heart to me in that respect. And I feel like we we've done a good job of giving the the map of the territory of like, here's how these things happen. But the thing that elevates it is that there are philosophical, aesthetic considerations and concerns that are happening in and around this, right?

41:05Why are they interested in this Bacchanal? Why are they interested in Greek? Why this obsessive look to the past? And, you know, I have a note here that it's extremes within extremes. Like college itself, when you think about college, a liberal arts college, or really, you know, any kind of, you know, humanistic, it's a weird idea, right? You go away and you spend time, and again, liberal arts and humanities, I'm going to draw a line around that for now, to study a bunch of old art stuff. And maybe some contemporary, maybe more contemporary now than in the older days. Certainly before this, too, but even here.

41:42And that is supposed to do something for you. And I'm leaving that intentionally sort of vague. And then you go into the world and do the real world stuff of your life. Right? There is a portal cult-like element. Like going back to ancient Greece of the academy of creating this small, like you're carving out a piece of regular life to do something pretty weird. Yeah. And it's so well established now that I sometimes forget, I sometimes forget, and I think we forget how kind of weird and special this is. And then you start to get extremes. Not do you have this Bennington slash Hamden is an extreme version of that.

42:18And then this little Lyceum with Julian is an extreme version of that. These kids are extreme version of that. And then the Bacchanal is sort of like the most, it's like a rushing nesting doll of college extremism, where a reducto ad absurdum is recreating a pre-enlightenment sensibility and trying to understand what it was like to be ancient Greek. It's kind of the natural extension of the liberal project writ large. It's very strange to think about it in that way.

42:46Jeff:It really is. Did you have any teachers like this in your educational background? No, I never had the kind of teacher I felt like I always wanted. And I'm kind of grateful for it. I had great mentors, but I never had the, I guess we'd almost call it like a parasocial relationship. You know, we have different language for it now. But as a teacher, I got to know students quite well, and I never had anything like this. But I can certainly see how it happens. I very much can see how it happens. I talked on the Sophocles episode about the big seminar I took my freshman year in college. And that was taught by four professors together, philosophy, theology, history, literature.

43:24Jeff:And then you had one of those four professors for your discussion sections. And my little group of 12 people that had this one professor for our discussion section were obsessed with him. Like not to this degree, and he was definitely not interested in cultivating any like cult leader situations, but he was brilliant or he seemed brilliant to our 18 year old selves who had never encountered these great works. He elevated our abilities. He believed that we could read these difficult, important, elevated things. And there's something very exciting and also just very appealing and compelling about that.

44:00Jeff:The way that an educator sees you as a person who could put on your black turtleneck and swirl a glass of wine. And I don't think they would be able to do this anymore. But the last week of the semester, this would have been 2002, he invited the 12 of us to his house for dinner. Yeah. And the drive there, like they rented a little like a little bus to take us out there. And the drive there was so, oh, my God, we get to go to Dr. Danforth's house. We're going to meet his wife. He's going to roast us a chicken. We might ascend to a higher plane. When I read the secret history the first time, I was like, I get it.

44:38Jeff:Like, I get how an educational experience has that impact and how a very charismatic teacher can have that. sort of impact. And also, this is the 80s. And they're avoiding Reaganite America that's happening. Literary people are resisting contemporary politics. And all of the characters feel like anachronisms. Everybody feels like they stepped out of an old-timey movie and found themselves in the 80s, like Fitzgerald characters in a Brett Easton Ellis world. And even Henry sees this about them. He says that regardless of circumstance, They lived like clockwork. None of them were the least bit interested in anything that went on in the world.

45:20Jeff:Like Bunny walks around calling everybody like old sport. Yeah, he's like, he really walked out of Great Gatsby, which we talked about in the Great Gatsby. So it itself is kind of a put on, right? He's a put on of a put on. And I think that's one thing that struck me as an older person. Like I read this. I don't think I've read this since I was a teenager. I don't remember that I had. Wow. And I have a lot of life experience that's both germane and not germane. And one thing that occurred to me is how uninterested or not uninterested. I don't even think they have the language to think about creating for themselves and a new understanding, creating their own life.

45:54There's so much reflected off Julian's glow. And they talk about the light of dying stars and like even the ancient Greeks were thinking about this. They are quite literally copying out Greek text for long stretches of the hours they spend in this book. We don't get a lot of ourselves because that's not narratively interesting. But to a first approximation, their education, because it's so cloistered, is three classes a week with Julian for a few hours where they talk. And the rest of the time, they're trans. We get a section of the ablative case versus the locative case. There is a certain monk-like drudgery to the actual schoolwork they're doing.

46:32And it's all to replicate. It's all to resuscitate, revive, reenact. There is very little sort of forward motion that I kind of think of one of the goals of, you know, a modern liberal education is like, these are foundational texts. We're not going to live here, but we want to see how these things happen. We want to understand how they're important. They give us ideas that we can take forward. This is all backward looking. This is all going back into the, like, to the edge of civilization in the wildness. Like, that's one thing about the Greeks I think they found attractive. The Greeks were emerging from it, right?

47:08We talked about this. Weirdly, this is right after Oedipus, which is amazing for us to do. I know.

47:12Jeff:I feel like an accidental genius for scheduling this book right after the Greeks. But the Greeks were like, you know, those are emerging from pagan beliefs, right? Like, let's create a different—we can make up life. We can make up how to be in the world. And this book is the inverse of that, right? You're going backward from over-civilized people. I think that one of the great scenes that I think really colors the whole book in a way I didn't understand. on first reading is the funeral weekend. Oh, yeah. They're trying to get away from that. Like whatever that, they don't want to be there. They don't want to participate.

47:45Like talking about who's got whose little airplane and confusing each other. They're looking for something else, but they can't get through that to something beyond. They can't see a way out of it. They don't want it, whatever happens. Maybe it's just that they found a little grain of sand to cling onto and create the pearl of their lives around, but it's all looking backwards. And I think there's something to that with Tartt herself, honestly. It feels at this moment, at least, and this can be a young person's game. It can be, you know, I am going to take on a mantle of the past, or I'm going to be like Kurt Cobain or something and try to smash my guitar into the future.

48:18Again, this is the early 90s. I have a thing here about this being the ultimate Gen X reading experience for me. Oh, yes. But I think that's something to watch for and to understand. it's like there is a shrink a smalling and shrinking in to find some way to protect or be in the world that they these are not comfortable kids in the world and this is the reaction to it

48:40Jeff:yeah right like we get occasional run-ins that richard has with judy poofy who lives down the hall and is like smoking a cigarette while she's drinking a diet coke and painting her toenails yeah, you want to go to what Judy's a good time at a party. But none of these guys are good times at parties. And one of the I think most satisfying things about the book is how near the end, Richard starts to realize that how he sees himself and how he sees these other characters is not the way that the rest of the world sees them that they experience themselves as this like sparkly, magical little group. And everybody else thinks that these guys are just huge weirdos.

49:21Jeff:I think it's Francis who comments to Henry near the end of the book. I think we forget, because we know Henry so well and we love Henry, what he looks like to everybody else. And that Henry's been obsessing about whether he's carrying the right book around to make the right impression on the feds that are investigating them. Like, is it Homer or is it Aquinas? These guys are not fit for public consumption in a lot of ways. Well, I think that that element of detachment is very much at play here. And it's interesting then to connect that with Donna Tartt's interest in privacy. I think they don't have to be related, but the sense of being a part, not a part, it's weird that a part and a part are like opposites.

50:06I've never thought about this before. but being away from whatever is liberatory, but it also can have these, it can make you into a grotesque. And I think there's a version of them that they're kind of grotesque where they think they're beautiful. And I think Tartt wants to see him as somewhere in between. Angels with horns or demons with wings. I'm not really sure, but I think she sees them between.

50:31Jeff:I think you're right. I think that there's something beautiful about what they're pursuing and that she admires the thing that they're pursuing, but also recognizes it that modern people can't pursue this and have it end in a way that is beautiful. It will end in horror. Yeah, and this idea that the moment of education in this sort of college, you could just call it a cloister. If you use that language, I think it's revealing that you can become not just attached, but really, really divorced from reality. Because another thing that's important to note here is the economic situation, where the economics of this are super baked into the dynamics of this group.

51:16There is play acting around, we don't ever need money because some of them have money that they don't need to work for, but it's not inexhaustible except in maybe one case, but even that comes with strings. But because there's enough, and because of the college environment, and Richard's only there because of financial aid, and Bunny's there because his parents could afford tuition but nothing else. I think they understand the precariousness of it. And by extension, therefore, they recognize how fragile and fleeting it is. And when you have something that you want to hold on to, you know, but you know that cannot be held on to, sometimes you do dumb stuff, right?

51:53Even, you know, Julian asked them, what's the opposite of, you know, what is desire ultimately is to live? And Bunny says to live forever. And then the thing beyond that is to live forever like this to live forever with these people in this moment and they know it can't happen they just they know it can't happen and the tensions of the outside world and their own personality start to pull it apart but even so i don't don't you think like is there a version of this where i want to be more about that without body count like what if it were because the thing that gets them out of this ecstatic state, both figurative and literally, is murder and the things that come with it.

52:37There's a part of me that just wants it to be life. We get more of that in the back half of the book, but I wonder if that tension came differently. Actually, I don't know if I'd like it better. I love the book as it is. But there's a version of this where I think it would feel more sort of straight-up literary, almost like a Lilly King book or something like that. Oh, yeah, that's an interesting call. It's just life that, like, it can't hold like this. Someone gets sick. They get called away. They make a decision. Other people. Julian retires or dies. Like, the center cannot hold. But that's just, it gives a lot more drama to have it be like there's a murder and that things happen.

53:13But this wasn't going to last anyway, Rebecca. I just want to say, like, no matter what happens with Bunny, this wasn't going to last.

53:17Jeff:Yeah, they were going to either graduate or drop out or something was going to happen to them. This was not. You can't hold on to that, like, cloistered life forever. The school was, at the very least, Hampton was going to tell them at some point, we're done with you. Like, you have graduated, you know, you don't have to go home, but you can't stay here kind of thing. A lot of intrusive thoughts in this reading experience. I think that's a good sign, though. I think the more intrusive thoughts you have, the more rich the reading experience is. Yeah, like, you know, it's written in the 90s. It's set in the 80s.

53:47Jeff:Bunny especially has, like, racist, sexist, homophobic takes. But a lot of the characters have takes that not only haven't aged well, but weren't good takes at the time. And it's part of the thing they're doing. Like, they're being sort of contrarian. They feel safe with each other. So they say all kinds of things. One of my most frequent intrusive thoughts in this reading experience was, oh, my God, I hope TikTok never picks up this book. Like, are there really insufferable Internet takes on the secret history already? I'm sure there are. There's insufferable takes on anything. That's true. Plus, if anything, it's insufferable takes.

54:22Jeff:Yeah, I don't want to find out. If you know of insufferable takes on the secret history, please don't send them to me. But the people of threads, in my understanding of what's happening over there, are maybe not ready to handle this. And that's okay. If this gets a little bit into the is it for you, but I think the insufferable takes are going to come from people who read with a moral gavel, right? You can see that. That's right. There's people that do bad things here, and they behave badly. I don't think you have to, I don't think Donna Tartt is either sort of affirming or denying, like she's not interested in judging them.

54:57I think she's interested in the actual behavior and the ramifications thereof and the sources that it comes from. You know, I think there's a part of, like the characters, Tartt and the book are trying to wriggle its way out of sort of extant, accepted morality, aesthetics, and, you know, epistemology. It's actively trying to get away from ready-made judgments. And Henry straight up says that.

55:22Jeff:He tells one of the other characters that committing the murder makes him feel free. It's the first thing in life that has ever made him feel free, that he can just do what he wants. Like in contemporary language, we would probably talk about Henry as like being pretty anxious. Maybe a sociopath, you know, I'm not sure. Very likely. but it's i just was like oh man this book is so complex and it takes its characters complexity seriously and it makes them interesting not to mention that like books about happy people who always do the right thing are not interesting that is not interesting fiction um but i just i don't want to know what the bad takes are on this there's also this long stretch of the book where it's over winter break like the hampton closes from like right before christmas through January and February.

56:12Jeff:And one of the reasons that's given on the page is that like, it's so cold. The school doesn't want to be in the roof. Yeah, yeah, they don't want to be heating. So the kids can't live on campus during this long winter break. Richard gets a sublease basically living in like the loft of an old hippies workshop. There's a hole in the roof. He is freezing. He gets pneumonia. And I just was like, what did he tell his parents he was going to be doing? Like, we know his parents are not great parents. And this is the 80s. So like, what not great parents are is more extreme than what not great parents often look like in, you know, millennial or Gen Z terms.

56:53Jeff:But that he's just like, no one asks where he's staying. His friends ask where he's staying and he just won't tell them. Like, I could not get over that. But I think my most intrusive thought was, do they even make a tape measure that is 48 feet long? That's a great note. Did he use a tape measure? Was that exclusively in the text? Yeah. They're talking about the ravine and how deep the ravine is. And Henry says, I went out there last week with a tape measure. It's 48 feet deep. And I was like, brrrr. Michelle, my partner who's an architect, has non-civilian tape measures. And I don't know how long those baby is, but we don't make any mention of it.

57:30that's a really funny.

57:31Jeff:Can you just pick one up at the hardware store that's 48 feet long? I think the one that we use in our rooms, they don't get much beyond 12 or 14 feet, honestly. They're not that long. I had another question for you about the Vermont thing. This is more of a lit crit English nerd thing. Why give us that whole section? It's pretty long. I think it's like the postmodernist Poe of it all. At least in my reading experience, he's cold and increasingly out of his mind and it we feel it like that's such a transitional moment for his experience there and it sets richard apart from his peers like while he's freezing his ass off bunny and henry are in italy and the twins are staying i think with a rich aunt and Francis is out at the country house.

58:24Jeff:And it is a long section, but it's so effective that I honestly have never wondered. Again, all questions I ask like this, the listeners should know. I'm not like, this is not like a subtle critique thing. I'm honestly asking because I think it works. It really works. You said his apartness, but ultimately he then gets rescued by a member of the group. And at the moment of his most otherness from the group, he then gets brought in and literally saved. And maybe that prepares us for his willingness to play along in Buddy's murder, frankly. It also really reminds us how aware he is of this posture he's taken with the group, of the role that he's performing.

59:02Jeff:He's never unaware that he doesn't have money, that he comes from a different social class and a different kind of background than they do. And he's really hoping that they have forgotten or that they might not have picked up on it, but that he's willing to just like shiver so much that he wakes up every morning in terrible pain and gets very sick, that he's willing to go through that to just to try to maintain his place in this social group. Like one of my hot takes that I don't think made it into my notes was like belonging is a hell of a drug. So you need to like be careful. That's a wonderful.

59:37I think it really is a wonderful point that the belonging that so many of these people are looking for. And it manifests in the rest of the college and the many college experiences of the fraternity, the sports team, the drugs, the party. Some of it is radical moments of belonging, to the point of detriment, to the point of mindlessness in the mob. but that is something that so many, when I was a student and then when I had students, the idea of coming from someplace else and then being accepted and accepting others that you have no reason to other than your own volition, it's not family, it's not happenstance, is extraordinarily powerful.

1:00:23And I don't think bunny dies if just one of them wants to kill him. It has to be the rest of them together doing it.

1:00:28Jeff:Yeah, it's a group think. Yeah, and protecting the group brother, each individual, as we find some people are willing to sacrifice themselves for the group. But if the group itself is at stake, they will take extreme action. My intrusive thought is other lit nerd stuff, like Dante's mentioned a bunch of times. And I was thinking of sort of a reverse comedia where we start in heaven, right before, you know, Richard's heaven and everything's going great. And it seems amazing. The purgatory, I think that funeral scene is purgatory for them. they're like sweating and sick and passing out and literally like being purged of the sin but then the back part is hell when they have to deal with their own consciousnesses about what they've actually done and it turns out none of them can really live with it none of them can live with that that funeral scene is so like it's it's not the most fantastic of the scenes throughout the book, but it's so potent.

1:01:26Jeff:And as you were talking about it just now, I was thinking like the ways that I picture the characters in that moment, I think are similar to like the fishes episode of the bear. That terrible family Christmas dinner where like everybody's yelling and throwing stuff and is drunk and the timer won't stop going off in the kitchen. And then mom is gonna drive her car through the wall of the house. Like it feels like everything is just going off the rails. and they're at Bunny's funeral surrounded by his family, just that like descent into not just madness, but chaos. They can't keep it all together.

1:02:03Jeff:All the wheels are coming off. Yeah. Another truth, was this peak upmarket commercial fiction? Like I feel like this is as good as example in the early 90s, like when Barnes & Noble was still getting kicking and indie bookstores. And I just feel like this is, when we talk about upmarket commercial or commercial literary, what we're talking about when we talk about commercial upmarket is the secret history book. I think you're right. That is what we're talking about. Yes. I think the answer to that is yes. Uncovered windows can make your home feel up to 20 degrees higher. Stay cool and save up to 45 % off custom window treatments during the 4th of July VIP access sale at Blinds.com From outdoor shades to room darkening blinds, finding the perfect fit is easy.

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1:04:25the thirsty Thursday, the modern Bacchanal that's happening all around them at all the times, is the poem that he reads at the funeral, which is this lovely elegy by A.E. Hausman, where it's like elevated language, but it's also very, it's like, I miss this guy. This is very sad. So it's neither in denial by drug nor antiquity. It's using art to engage with the real feeling in the moment. That's the kind of thing. Is there a Goldilocks messaging in there of some kind.

1:04:55Jeff:Maybe. And you know, I think that the fact that we find out that Henry's reading this poem, and that it's a poem Bunny loved. One of my takes is Bunny is the most normal one in the group. Like, you know, in some ways he is. Yeah, I think that's Yeah, like, he's less interested in all of this Greek stuff than everybody else's. He likes the proximity to money. He likes the I think he's the great, the great moochers, one of the great moochers, if not the great moocher of I've ever read. Yeah, but there are spelling errors all over anything that he writes in English. One of the other students has to copy edit his Greek homework.

1:05:33Jeff:He can't even type correctly when he's drunk and he's sending the letter to Julian that's supposed to tell Julian what everybody has done that we don't find out about until months later. But he's just kind of the most normal dude. Also, he's 24, so he's more than a super senior. in college at this point. I had a thought. The more middle-brow. I had an intrusive thought. At the time, this was contemporary fiction. Now it reads like historical fiction. And I'm just looking at this worldview, what these kids are doing. Again, they shouldn't be drinking this much. It's not good for you. Be safe out there.

1:06:07But getting too close to the classics, being insular, pretentious a-holes, I'd take it all over TikTok. I'd take it all over TikTok.

1:06:16Jeff:Yeah, maybe not the murder, but the rest of it, yeah. No, the rest of it. But this is an intrusive thought. I'm not saying I believe this. I'm not saying I'm arguing for it. This is an intrusive thought of like, this is all better than TikTok. It just is. It's just better than whatever that is. At least they're out there in the world. Like you don't, well, one of my other takes is that they literally don't make them like this anymore. This kind of book, or at least you can't set this kind of book in today, in the 2020s, because phones have ruined it. Like so much of this is who's over at whose house?

1:06:49Jeff:Where can we find Henry? So many unanswered phone calls. How many unanswered phone calls are knocked doors? Like, who has gone where? Who can give me a ride? Will you answer the phone? How are the cops going to find out? Can there be a cover up? And technology obviates like almost all of the interesting and fun and tense moments of this book. It's like Seinfeld plus Agatha Christie plus Wonder Boys. That's what you get when you get The Secret History. College as Rumspringa for white collar workers. I've kind of tipped my hand to this event, this take a little bit before, but this idea that this is a carved out four year expensive bacchanal that you get it out of your system and then you go work in insurance.

1:07:27And like that's presented pretty directly about what the future for a lot of these characters. That's definitely what Bunny's going to go do. This is intrusive thought because I had watched Charlie Rose's interview with Donna Tartt in getting ready for this because I wanted to remind myself of the idea, the real Donna Tartt speaking versus the idea of Donna Tartt, which I haven't engaged with in a long time. and he had some other me too stuff and shouldn't be on the air for other reasons but even without that it was so frustrating because he clearly hadn't as someone who always does the homework he hadn't read the book he's asking the most asinine questions there's so much more for to get there i was like this is i'm glad podcasts exist just so that charlie rose isn't primary in there like just we we have to do some this is too this is terrible it's horrible it was an affront to me and all thinking people.

1:08:16Another intrusive thought I have written here, these are 20 year olds. These are 20 year olds.

1:08:21Jeff:They're kids, they're kids, they're kids, they're kids, they're kids. That don't want to be in this. I think the medium is the message is true for a lot of things, as McLuhan said, but also the scene and the context and the structure that we've created for 20 year olds in this milieu has weird side effects. I just don't think we think about enough. I just don't think we appreciate the strangeness and the wonderful strangeness, the terrible beauty to get at one of the underlying messages of the book there. I also really wish I had a chance to teach this. When I was teaching the Great Books course at Columbia for a few years, I had sort of a dealer's choice at the end.

1:08:58And I would teach Whitman or Virginia Woolf or Invisible Man. Those are sort of the three that I went through. and those are all worthy choices but i since this was about the experience of reading the great books in college would have been incredible would have been really fascinating to see what the conversation what i really wish i could have done it so that was one of my interests yeah that would

1:09:20Jeff:have really and you know like one of the signal experiences of aging is when you revisit a piece of media that you loved as a young person and now you identify with like the parents in the story So I spent a good portion of this thinking about Julian's perspective. What would a flipped perspective version of this book from his take have been like? Is he really trying to cultivate this in these students? He's not that interested in spending one-on-one time with them. He invites them over occasionally. Their understanding, I think, is they have a much more parasocial relationship with him than he has with them.

1:09:56Jeff:He's not quite in the Don Draper, I never think about you place. But they're like, these kids are very occupied most of the time with what Julian thinks, with what he wants them to do, with how they're going to impress him. And I don't think he's sitting around at home thinking about them. He's completely uncriticized in the course of the text. He ultimately betrays them, sort of, like not actually, but emotionally, availability wise, he betrays them. And even that is seen as, you know, he functions more like an Olympian, which where his own he's a moral universe of himself he's neither right or wrong he's just divine and then once he departs because they have wronged him um or they have wronged his sensibility it's seen as sort of like zeus just taken off like it's not it's not something that's up for our discussion or even our our idea for you is this for you i think you probably have got a lot of this but if you like literary genre of course if you're into atmosphere and like fitzgerald is so wonderful at.

1:10:56Tarte is also wonderful at relaying relationships that are complicated, fraught, and subterranean. And I think she's especially attuned to those and well able to articulate them. The feeling of getting a feeling about the relationship of other people is a really fascinating artistic experience. And I think text is uniquely positioned to do it correctly. I don't even movies can do this as well. And I think it's one reason both Gatsby and Secret History have a narrator is because it gives you someone thinking about looking at someone. If you're into the classics, the ideas of reading and study is sacraments of their own kind.

1:11:34What about maybe not, Rebecca? Did you agree with my take here?

1:11:37Jeff:As you said earlier, yeah, you said if you wield a moral gavel in your heart while you're reading, this is not a book for you. And that's right. These characters are unlikable. They do terrible, unjustifiable things. They don't feel that bad about it. They're more concerned with getting away with it than they are with the fact that they have killed someone. So if all of that and the fact that like many of them are tossing off 1980s era homophobic, racist kinds of opinions about things, if that's going to be a barrier or an issue for you, you're not going to have a good time. Or yeah, if you're you say if you're overly concerned with plausibility, that's right.

1:12:11Jeff:If you're looking for like how realistic a plot is, this is maybe not the place that you want to go. I think if you're the kind of reader that needs to come down on a definite answer, especially around what happened in the Bacchanal, like I think some negative capability of like they believe that something weird happened, also it could have been a put on. I think you need to kind of hold them both as possibilities to have sort of maximize your reading experience on that side. Let's see. The Immortal Questions that Art asks. I'll read through them, and Rebecca, you tell me what you think are primary here.

1:12:41Who am I? I say this is R.S.T. And obviously this is about who am I. What is the good life? What do I owe my neighbor? How do I know what I know? Is this all there is? How to deal with the certainty of death? What else might there be? And what's the deal with good and evil? Rebecca, which of these do you think are primary?

1:13:00Jeff:Many of them are primary. I mean, I think the students are concerned with what is the good life. Tart is less concerned with that question. But the students are wrestling with it, or they're trying to create this life that they think is really interesting. What do I owe my neighbor? What do we owe each other? What do these students owe each other is very present. How do I know what I know is present in their experiences with each other, but also in their learning of classical texts and interrogation of philosophy? Is this all there is? That's probably the biggest one, that these people, they are looking for a transcendent experience, for a connection to something outside of the world that they live in.

1:13:43Jeff:And whether they get there through alcohol or drugs or a Dionysian ritual, they're trying to access something. Well, you make the point, and I think it's right, that Henry gets there. It's not the Bacchanal. It's the radical freedom, the pre-civilization freedom of killing someone without consequence. Possibly the most radical freedom one can enjoy, and it is the purview of kings and gods, typically. You need to not be—if you're found out, you have to be a king or a god. or as the Greeks invented, you need a jury system as they invent in the Oresteia because otherwise you just get in cycles of revenge.

1:14:18But to kill without consequence is kind of the end point of any logical extensions of radical freedom. So they find it. I think what they find is that it's terrifying and unsustainable. And you don't want to stay out there.

1:14:31Jeff:I mean, it's less about how to deal with the certainty of death because they're not wrestling with their own so much. They're too young to worry about that yet. And they're not mourning the loss of Bunny. a little bit but that's not a primary thing nobody does said a quote earlier to live and then to live forever so it's yeah i think it's there to some degree yeah what else might there be kind of the bacchanal yeah the bacchanal and then can we get there can we get to the greek and then really what's the deal with good and evil like and richard wrestles with this a lot he tells us that he he never comes to think of any of them as evil or as bad people um so if you're not an evil person and you commit an act like this, what's going on there?

1:15:12Yeah. I think the tart replaces evil with selfishness, right? If sort of the good of the group is selflessness, the selfishness, the first crime we can see as being almost like Oedipus of like a crime of being in the world. Like it just kind of happened. You put yourself into a position where something terrible happened. And using our sort of like post-enlightened morality, that's almost an accidental death. I'm sorry, kind of a situation. If they had owned up to it at that moment, there would have been ramifications, but they're not spending their life in prison, I don't think. It's sort of an adult looking at this whole situation.

1:15:49Now, to a 20-year-old, you may not know that, where they get into the real trouble is murdering as cover-up, murdering as instrumental in protecting and being selfish as themselves, not giving themselves up, like Socrates did with Hemlock, to the justice system, because otherwise it's madness, right? Otherwise you can do anything. And I don't think most of us, not anyone I want to know, wants to live in that world. Rebecca, are we sure this isn't about art and writing?

1:16:16Jeff:We are 1 million percent sure that it is about art and writing. And what does it say about it? I mean, that's rhetorical, but what it has to say about art and writing, I think maybe less clear, but more interesting. Yeah, I mean, maybe the closest is that if we can access real transcendence, it's through art and writing. That's the closest real and humane experience of transcendence that the characters have. I think Tartt has had that experience of art being transcendent. But yeah, absolutely. A billion percent. Yeah, I think we either said it before, you have it in your quotes, but like that terror is the other side of the coin of true beauty.

1:16:55and that there's a quote about, you know, I think one of the characters quotes Aristotle is saying that art allows us to look at the horrible and find some meaning in it. And that terribleness of beauty helps us understand, I think, what the aesthetic reaction we have to something like Hamlet or something like Oedipus or something like Schindler's List, frankly. Like when we talk about, you know, sometimes like what your favorite movie, you sound like a maniac if you say Schindler's List, yet everyone knows it's great. This definition of beauty is that it incorporates, not just incorporates, but requires there to be the element of darkness, the element of the tragic or the horrible or the terrible.

1:17:39Jeff:Like in the philosophical vocabulary, maybe closer to the sublime than the straight and beautiful. Yeah, right. And that if done well, rather than need a bacchanal, you can have a play. Right. Right. At some level. Could you get the most, let's do adaptation talk. This is sort of sprinkled throughout our notes here. Famously, one of the great unproduced novels has been optioned multiple times. Every generation of 20-year-old actor gets the unadapted secret history they deserve. Yeah. It's like tied up in Hollywood adaptation bureaucracy hell is my understanding. I guess going down to my hot take is I think I don't want an adaptation.

1:18:25I think I'm glad there's not one. I'm usually like, if adapt, that's fine. And if someone came up to adaptation, I would not protest. But I am kind of happy living in the world where there's no adaptation because, as we said, it is a book of language and writing and doing things that books and text can do primarily. I think you're right. There's a version of this that is very interesting to look at. But I think it'll be very difficult to get the interiority and depth and the relation of the unsaid. Film just can't do that as well. Yeah, it would be very hard to do the Bacchanal.

1:19:00Jeff:Because the way it comes out, it unfolds on the page is the characters telling Richard about it after the fact. And their memory of it is hazy. And they had these weird visions or hallucinations. And there are filmmakers or TV showrunners that could do this, but it would have to be done exactly the right way to maintain the mystery about that event. And how hazy and drug-fueled or confusing it was. And I think Hollywood, there's a lot of ways that Hollywood could go wrong with the stuff that happens in this story. You could get the gist from watching a Signal adaptation. And I think like Chalamet is probably dying to get a chance to play Richard Papen before he's too old to do it.

1:19:56Do you think it would be him? I wonder where you put the star.

1:20:03Jeff:Well, I mean, I bet Henry, he'd have to like bulk up. Henry's like tall and strong. They don't have to do any of this. Like you just need to be weird and aloof. And I mean, he can do weird and aloof. He could do it. He could do it. But Chalamet is dying for a crack at the secret history. I think I am also glad to not have a version of it on the screen. And the reading experience is really cinematic. Yes. You could, I'm not typically a reader who like sees the movie in my head as I read, but I can get there with this because Tarte is that good. I think there's parts of a filmed adaptation of it that I would really like to see just like the establishing shots and like the parties and the buildings and the rooms.

1:20:42A production designer would go ham on something like that.

1:20:46Jeff:To that, I do need to say, you need to Google and look at the campus of Bennington. Oh, I saw this note. I mean to do this. I haven't looked at the Bennington. I've seen it before, but I should have. I have a friend who lives in Southern Vermont. I've spent some time right around there. I've been to the Bennington campus. And these characters, the students all live in little houses on campus, not in traditional dorms. And that is what it looks like. It's kind of a trip to drive through that campus and see it. And also that setting, then it lends this intimacy to somebody coming over and you're in these houses and you can picture the fireplaces and the living rooms and just kind of that more romantic idea of college than like I was in a high-rise dorm that was built in the 70s.

1:21:29Jeff:Yeah, it's much more like a commune, right? Like I was in a giant state school. Right. I was like 5 ,000 people in my freshman class. Definitely take a spin through the Bennington campus online. This next question, this is just for fun. It's like, if there were a Muppet version where a human plays one character, who should that character be and who should the actor be? I think Henry is a hilarious idea. It's like if Boo Radley actually was who they all thought Boo Radley was. Like this nut. But also is very alluring in his own kind of way. but your idea of Bunny where the Muppets push a human off the edge of a cliff is hilarious I had the hardest time trying to think of who of our contemporary 20-something or even early 30s who can play a 20-something actor could do this because Bunny is like a big, I picture him as like he's tall, he's a big, blonde waspy, like rugby player kind of dude and we just don't have a lot of those guys If Billy Magnuson was 10 years younger, he could do it.

1:22:34Jeff:Yeah, he could do it. But I like the idea of Bunny as the only human in a Muppet cast and a bunch of Muppets pushing him off the cliff. It's probably more practical. Piggy giving the karate chop to the chest. It's probably like more practical for Henry to be the only human character because Henry's in the whole thing and Bunny is, you know, off screen. A lot like Jacob Elordi could also take a crack at Henry. He's a little more of the build that Donna Tartt tells us. I like your idea here for Stellan Skarsgård. Stellan Skarsgård, he plays the knowing, like he did this in Good Will Hunting. It's a very similar, he's more aloof in this, but like a cosmopolitan person who plays intelligent really well.

1:23:18He wears a scarf like a madman. Like no one looks as great as a scarf for whatever reason. He's had the, I'm 49 and I've stopped losing my hair, but it stopped in just the right place where I can still get a little beautiful blonde flip. I think he would be, and he's imposing, like he's a big guy. So it feels like there's a weight to him that is, I think would come across on screen, which you kind of need to represent that.

1:23:41Jeff:This is a genius idea. I love this one. If it were to be adapted, adapted, pardon me, there were to be an adaptation, would you pick a musical movie or prestige six-part HBO show? This is a new inclusion. We're trying this out for a spin. I want a movie. I think a movie's right. It might be a long boy, but I think that's right. Give me two and a half hours. That's fine. Highest likelihood of doing it well and not spinning out. A musical would just be deranged. I added one. It just occurred to me. Or a play. It could be a terrific play. It could be a terrific play. I would not want a television series.

1:24:19Jeff:There are just way too many places that people could get a little too excited about stuff. And there were moments of real interpersonal tension. Like, you know, when I mean, of course, when they're, you know, confronting Bunny at the top of this ravine, but even planning it where they're like the letter that's going to expose to Julian that they actually did this interrogation scenes, even between them in their rooms, like getting mad at each other. I think you could fill a room. Oh, yeah. an auditorium with that with that vibe the scene when even though richard has been suspecting that charles and camilla sleep with each other the scene where he is in the kitchen with them and he sees charles like give his sister a lingering kiss yeah it is a sloppy one like there are like five adjectives in that sentence where tart is describing this kiss and it is horrifying and There would be a gasp through a theater when that happened.

1:25:16I did have the funny thought that's a little inappropriate, but I'll say it here. We're in a safe space now. That if we're casting the Muppets, casting Camilla and Charles as Piggy and Kermit would be hilarious. That they're twins, but also that they're... Let's see. Trivia, adaptations, rumors, misattributed quotes. A lot of the stuff is from the interviews and profiles. The last paragraph of that 1992 Vandy profile of Tart is about how the goldfinch is her favorite bird. Like it's a whole paragraph. And I was like, that is too crazy for words.

1:25:46Jeff:20 years later, we get the goldfinch. I mentioned the first edition of mine has this unusual description of second printing before a publication. Like that's just hype train stuff. It's this weird format. There were multiple printings of review copies because the demand was so huge. The original title was God of Illusions. Interesting. Which we could do another hour on the difference there. We haven't talked about the title, which maybe we can hear at the end. No sex in the first drafts. And Breda Stinell is right and said he found that unbelievable for these 20-year-olds to be like... It's a good note.

1:26:14Hanging around and not having... And boy, did Tart fill in those.

1:26:19Jeff:She took that feedback. Yeah. All right. We're running long, but you know what? Okay, fine. Favorite quotes. We've got a bunch. Where do you want to go? We can't do all of these. We're coming off of, you know, Greek and self-fulfilling prophecies with Sophocles in our last episode. But is there anything as Greek as Richard's saying? It was an entirely random decision, which, as you will see, turned out to be quite fateful. and then coming out of the seminar one day this this just like captures the vibe of what tart gets for the magic of their experience after class i wandered downstairs in a dream my head spinning but acutely achingly conscious that i was alive and young on a beautiful day the sky a deep deep painful blue wind scattering the red and yellow leaves and a whirlwind of confetti.

1:27:11Jeff:Beauty is terror. Whatever we call beautiful, we quiver before it. That's great stuff. And you can see on the structural level, there's one long sentence there with multiple subordinate clauses, independent clauses connected by semicolons, multiple adjectives, chained adverbs. I think that helps give you the sense of this envelopedness that he's getting into. This is a totality of feeling. And these long sentences that are super descriptive could border on purple prose if Tarte wasn't so good, but just gives us a real sensory experience of the totality of his experience. I mean, my favorite stuff in this book is how she describes the characters.

1:27:50Jeff:Like Bunny is described as a person who sailed through the world guided only by the dim lights of impulse and habit. And then there's a long quote that I think is worth reading where Richard describes what happens to Henry, who is like tall and kind of imposing and broody, but what happens when he's in public situations? It was funny, but people never seemed to notice at first glance how big Henry was. Maybe it was because of his clothes, which were like one of those lame but curiously impenetrable disguises from a comic book. Why does no one ever see that bookish Clark Kent without his glasses is Superman?

1:28:27Jeff:Or maybe it was a question of his making people see. He had the far more remarkable talent of making himself invisible in a room, in a car, a virtual ability to dematerialize at will. And perhaps this gift was only the converse of that one, the sudden concentration of his wandering molecules rendering his shadowy form solid all at once, a metamorphosis startling to the viewer. One of the greatest to do it. I'll do a few here. It is dangerous to ignore the existence of the irrational. The more cultivated a person is, the more intelligent, the more repressed, the more he needs some method of channeling the primitive impulses he's worked so hard to subdue.

1:29:09Otherwise, those powerful old forces will mass and strengthen until they are violent enough to break free, more violent for the delay, often strong enough to sweep the will away entirely. So there's a mind-body dualism thing, right? I talked about the Socrates before, but the moment of him drinking the Henrock, that's sort of a triumph of the intellect over the sort of primal will to live, like that primacy of that instinct. And this passage is like, that is for some possible, but for most of us, we're still meat sacks walking around. And we have desires and urges that transcend society, that transcend the law.

1:29:46And sometimes we call those midlife crises. Sometimes we call them crime. But how do you account for the wildness within, that animal within, the ego? And if you don't do it, it becomes even the more dangerous. So that's what the idea of the rumspring is exactly into this. You get the spring break. You have these momentary. I think of this now. What do we do about this now? The closest thing I could come to, of course, there's sex, right? And that's part of what's going on here. And some of that is so sublimated that these characters have trouble dealing with it openly. and honestly, I was thinking of the live concert or the sporting event.

1:30:26Like these moments of non-individual, collective, cathartic release that is sort of amoral. It doesn't have any meaning besides itself of just, blah, yay, hooray.

1:30:39Jeff:Yeah, that there has to, there's something very Freudian about this too. Like there has to be a release valve. And it makes sense in the Tartt story here that it's Henry who commits the worst of the crimes. He's also trying to be the most locked down. The harder you try to repress and control and be this classical Greek figure who's just going to speak 900 languages and read all of the great books, the more powerful those urges are that have to have some mode of escape. The ego can only hold the id down for so long. Yeah, yeah. I alluded to this, but I love this passage where they're talking about this fantasy of holding forever in suspension this moment.

1:31:23The idea of living there, of not having to go back ever again to asphalt and shopping malls and modular furniture, of living there with Charles and Camilla and Henry and Francis and maybe even Bunny, of no one marrying or going home or getting a job in a town a thousand miles away or doing any of the traitorous things friends do after college, of everything remaining exactly as it was that instance. the idea was so truly heavenly that I'm not sure I thought even then that it could ever really happen but I like to believe it it's so relatable I mean I think in the ethics of Aristotle happiness is having what you want and having it forever and he doesn't say this but it's the forever that gets you into trouble that's where the eastern religions and sensibilities like you gotta hold this stuff loosely because it's going away but that's beyond the ken of most of us mere mortals to hold well.

1:32:14The surreal, the strange we talked about. Sometimes when there's an accident in reality is too sudden and strange to comprehend, the surreal will take over. Action slows to a dreamlike glide, frame by frame. The motion of a hand, a sentence spoken, fills an eternity. Thought that was good. Hot takes. Hot, I got some hot ones.

1:32:31Jeff:This is for contemporary readers, but this is the book Catawbas has wanted to be. I thought about that so much. Like these characters are smart. They're dropping classical references all over the place. They're dealing with stuff. It's just hard to live up to secret history vibes. Also, this book is a great argument for mood stabilizers. This is an unbelievable hot take. If there's Lexapro in 1984, do we get the secret history? No. And is that an argument for Lexapro? I mean, the characters need a little help, but the story that we've got is great. I was just like, man, yeah, none of this shit's happening if somebody here has Lexapro or access to a good therapist.

1:33:17Jeff:I also think the blurbs for the book really oversell Julian's role. It's presented as these students who fall under the spell of a charismatic professor. And Julian is persuasive to them because of the way that they see him, but it never reads to me as if he's trying to get them to do anything. I don't think he really cares what they're up to. And then he's actually quite horrified by what has happened. He seems to lack even the courage of his teaching. At some level, I think they wanted him to say, like, I see what you were doing. Like, you know what? Like, I see how you got here. Not ideal. But I think they say at one point, even his condemnation would have been more reassuring because at least he would have had principles of some kind.

1:33:57But he just nopes out. It's pretty.

1:34:00Jeff:He really does. It's really kind of striking. And then maybe this should go up in the how to tell if this book isn't for you. It is wild when siblings having sex with each other is like the eighth most upsetting thing that happens in a book. You know, one of the things I think this coterie of characters find in themselves in this group is a suspension of parochial morality, right? Like you can, we may know, and Bunny then puts the screws to you. Like I think the one, his great sin is not that he was going to blackmail them or whatever, but he would not let them be with their strangeness. He's continually needling Richard about being, he's not actually who he says he was.

1:34:39Like that Francis is gay, won't let him go. That Camilla and Charles have a relationship that's not ideal. They're doing some things that I think probably you'd want to talk to some people about and maybe stem if you could. But Bunny is like there, the specter of his parochial judgment is always there. And even Henry's strangeness is given quarter in these places. And I think that's another thing a lot of us hope for, is that we will find a place where our strangeness is given quarter. And maybe they break some boundaries. But maybe with some limits. Yeah, maybe with some. And I think that these are all not equivalent activities, but they all go into breaking the normal morality of the world in which they live.

1:35:20And they find a place where they can, for lack of a better term, be themselves to some degree. My hot take, they shouldn't adapt this. I wouldn't do this. This would not be a project I would take anywhere. This story is actually about the precarious finances of expensive, non-elite private liberal arts colleges. The turning point in the investigation is when the university tells to the town's cops who they have a great relationship with, we don't want to drag this out any further because freshman applications were down 20%. That might be the single most important moment in the book structurally.

1:35:52But also Julian is allowed this largesse because he only takes a dollar a year in salary because he's been bankrolled by oil barons. like how much of this and then these kids are good yeah after he nopes out they're like we're

1:36:06Jeff:not going to continue doing this anymore because nobody was de facto subsidizing his strange little school within a school and then you know these people who have money to pay tuition but like don't have the grades are allowed to be there because they can pay tuition so there's that take is this all that different than dead poet society it's dead poet society with murder and drugs. There's a murder, but like we get the climax of both of them is a suicide. It's true. And the thing that makes them both so compelling and magical is that transcendent experience with art and literature. And not just your individual transcendent experience with art and literature, but doing that in community, connecting with other people who also feel that way about books.

1:36:52I mean, the Keating-Julian thing is, I mean, I'm sure there's a grad student paper out there about sort of pedagogy and fantasy pedagogy in late 80s and early 90s popular culture. But like Keating, he has no more power than Julian to save the boys and the kids from themselves. That Keating seems genuinely that he would have stuck around but wasn't allowed to is the signal difference between them. Not that he could have done much more. Further reading Rex for read-alikes books inspired this one, etc. Yeah, I think you're you say your first one here.

1:37:21Jeff:I think this is I mean, this is one of the great read-alike challenges. It's a pretty singular reading experience. But I think The Talented Mr. Ripley by Patricia Highsmith is as good as you're going to get in terms of the vibe and the like creeping sinisterness of things. Read the book. Like you will not get the creeping sinister feeling from the 90s adaptation. There is some of it in the in last year's Netflix adaptation. And then I like yours here. It's like Ripley crossed with The Great Gatsby crossed with The Dead Poets Society. The sinisterness of Ripley with the sensibility of the Great Gatsby and the setting of Dead Poets.

1:37:57But it's like saying cake is just flour, sugar, and baking soda. Eating one of those individually is not the same as eating chocolate cake.

1:38:02Jeff:Right. Cocktail party crib sheet, three to five takeaways. If somebody seems like a troubled weirdo performing their genius, you should believe the troubled weirdo part.

1:38:15Jeff:Also, reading this really feels like getting in a time machine in the very best way. I think this is what I would actually say about this book at a dinner party if it came up. They don't make them like this anymore because it's nearly impossible for a person to do the kind of performance and identity reinvention that these characters do in the age of the Internet. Not to mention all of the ways that phone tracking would change the cover up and the investigation. But it feels like a literary time machine. And it's a pretty as a reading experience in 2025. It's pretty transcendent itself. yeah my i kind of script from both because i think if you said to someone this is part gatsby part ripley part dead poets like people like oh that makes sense to me like you're using other references to get to and i think you get to it pretty quickly maybe we can add this to um let's build a comp that people would understand i i mine is like this is peak gen x literature interestingly no one is trying to be rich or famous to the point of self-destruction i was thinking of the polar opposite campus novel which is the social network yes It is the exact – they only care about money insofar as it allows them just to do this, right?

1:39:24Bunny has some other – he wants to live high on the hog, so to speak. And it's just one reason that he is murdered is not just because the literal thing he's going to do, but how unlike him he fundamentally is when it comes to his relationship with money. No one was trying to be rich or famous to the point of self-destruction. And Bunny's family at the funeral, that was the life they were all trying to avoid. That's the plastics seen in The Graduate. That is anathema to them. They want anything but that. And they don't look to move to San Francisco or form a band, but they move to art. This is like the campus equality of let's start a zine or a little magazine or a band or something like that.

1:40:09But that feels very Gen X to me. It was the tune in, turn on, drop out of the 90s was like make art and give the world the middle finger. And that's what they're trying to do. Zero to well read score. Each one gets a score from one to 10 with 10 being the highest. Here are the five categories. Historical importance, readability, current relevance of central questions, book nerd, read cred, and oh damn factor. Interesting case, Rebecca. Historical importance, probably the lowest score we have encountered so far.

1:40:38Jeff:Yeah, because it didn't really change fiction in some way. It is still comped pretty often in publishing circles. It's a really good point for something that's... I mean, Tartt is still in circulation, even though it's every 10 years, but a Tartt novel is an event. I'm going to go like three historical importance. I was thinking three as well. Readability, nine? Nine, yeah. It's super readable. If it's not a 10, what is? Maybe if I need to recalibrate here. I would say it's only not a 10 because some of the references might be a barrier to entry or things that people would bump up on. Yeah. Right.

1:41:23Yeah. I also think that the page count matters when we're talking about readability. I mean, it is almost 600 pages. 600 to 700 pages is a commitment. Current relevance of central questions. Hmm.

1:41:36as you say it feels more like a time machine so we have to if that is true it can't be a nine or

1:41:41Jeff:ten yeah it feels in the five six zone to me i mean the question central questions about the utility of art then that's like always already a 10 a 10 forever right how much is this an 80s book is an interesting question and i'm not sure about that six kind of split the difference six, seven, eight, somewhere in there, seven and a half. We'll do a seven, yeah. Book nerd read cred. Hmm. I think this is actually pretty high. Like this is one of those books that's kind of a lingua franca for book nerds where like if you've read it, it's an if you know, you know book experience, yeah. Seven, six? Yeah, yeah, seven.

1:42:25Oh, damn factor. This, if we're first time listening, just we didn't, you know, the actual experience on the page in the moment when you're like, wow, that was something right there.

1:42:33Jeff:It's high. Like the first time reading this book is a 10. Going back, it's probably an eight. Yeah, if you're coming into a cold, you can get a nine or a 10 out of it. You can get your socks knocked off by a first experience with this book. I'd say nine. It can't be 10, but it can be nine. We didn't talk about the title. What's the secret history here, Rebecca? I mean, it's doing a lot of things. All of these characters, to some degree, have their own secret histories. they are covering up the secret history of their behavior. Julian has a secret history that he doesn't quite tell them about, but that they wonder about.

1:43:10Jeff:I think it's Tart working on several levels. I was thinking about this too. And I think at one point Julian says something effective, or one of them says like, we can't really ever know the Greeks. Like we can only read what they've left behind, but we can't inhabit them. And that's like a challenge to the students. And I think there's an element to that in the title as well. It's like we have history, but then there's the secret, there's the unsaid, the unknowable stuff within the traditions and the artistic worlds that we come out of that are just inaccessible to us. And that's why people are still translating.

1:43:40It's never quite right. Our understanding of it can never, and not only that, we can never know how wrong it is. I think that's the double whammy of any kind of knowing like that. There's a moment where she's talking, I keep thinking of the narrator as being female. This is just something that happened because I'm so saying with Tartt. I think that's what's happening. So pardon me if I've used incorrect pronouns there. But Richard, he's the only one that becomes an academic. And he starts studying Jacobian tragedies. Yeah. Jacobin, I think maybe it's Jacobin. It's been a while since I said that word out loud.

1:44:11Maybe 30 years. No, 20 years. Don't email us about that. The mode of Marlowe. Marlowe was dark Shakespeare who died at 29 in a bar fight, which is very much in the secret history mode. Richard talks about the titles of those plays like the white like they knew how to title something I think there's a part of it that's just a cool title it is a cool title it's just a cool ass title

1:44:36Jeff:I mean The God of Illusions is a pretty good title too but The Secret History is an all-timer it's an all-time title there anything else Rebecca before we go man I'm so glad that we got to read this again it was great too I'm so glad we got to read it again I think it holds up how about if this was released today what do you think I mean, it would be historical fiction. I need to believe that we would recognize its greatness if it were new today. I desperately need to believe that. I didn't say this about one of my skepticism of adaptations. My primary one was about the interpersonal observations that come across best as text.

1:45:16My other problem with an adaptation, it's still the same on the page. I think we have a harder time now with having anything I'm not even saying sympathy but an openness to feeling along with these kids as they murder someone and do a bunch of crappy things I don't think TikTok would take to that very well like the threads the moral gavel is wielded in those places and these are bad people doing bad things I think would overwhelm a popular attempt to do this

1:45:48Jeff:Yeah, but I'm so glad. And if you have listened all the way to the end of this episode. Yeah, almost two hours now. And you have not read The Secret History. I know we have told you a lot about it here. And I still fully believe it will be surprising and exciting and compelling. And that even if you know what the plot beats are going to be, the way that Donna Tartt unfolds those, it is pretty transcendent. transcendent. My first reading experience of it, I was no longer sitting on a couch in a suburban living room in the Midwest while 25 relatives roamed about. I was on that campus. The leaves were turning.

1:46:27Jeff:We were pushing money off the cliff. It's amazing. It's a great book. Email us, zerotowellread at bookratt.com. Show notes are bookratt.com slash listen. Thanks to books for sponsoring season one of zero to well read and we are a proud member of the airwave podcast network rebecca until next time thank you so much it's a good one