64
PARTISAN REVIEW
profiles of the twenty-eight-year-old author in
Vanity Fair, Esquire,
Vogue?
All sorts of explanations have been suggested, and the fact that
there's usually one media-hype every season may be as good as any. But
there remains the enigma, particularly after we've actually read the book,
as to what the fuss is all about. To start, then, with the ridiculous.
Murder - two murders, in fact - is presumably the central drama of
Tartt's campus novel. But it is not a detective story and there's no mys–
tery, since we are told the who and how of the murders before they oc–
cur. Nor is there any adequate attempt to explore the motives and con–
sequences of the killings. As the narrator, Richard Papen, airily remarks at
one point, murder is simply "a dropped stone falling to the lake bed
with scarcely a ripple." And so it goes.
This awkward young man, desperately eager to escape his dreary
hometown and philistine family in California, makes his way east to
Hampden College in Vermont, a thinly disguised version of Tartt's alma
mater, Bennington (a school also portrayed as a druggy paradise of self–
indulgence by Tartt's classmate and mentor, the notorious Bret Easton
Ellis). Because the country-bumpkin narrator is possessed of "a morbid
longing for the picturesque at all costs," he falls in with a rarefied group
of five aesthetes who are reading the Greek classics exclusively with their
even more rarefied professor, Julian Morrow. He sets the lofty tone for
each class with the pitter-Pater hope that "we're all ready to leave the
phenomenal world, and enter into the sublime ."
Bewitched and bedazzled by his stylish new friends, Richard ascribes
to them "a strange cold breath of the ancient world: they were magnifi–
cent creatures, such eyes, such hands, such looks -
sic oculus, sic ille manus,
sic ora Jerebat."
(Tartt word-drops Latin even when she's echoing an old
pop song.) Only one of the golden troupe is out of sync and out of
place - Bunny Corcoran, whose real name, Edmund, is the novelist's
jokey wink to the reader who remembers that Edmund Wilson's nick–
name was Bunny. Tartt's Bunny is a thick-headed, dyslexic, vulgar prep–
pie - she never explains how this unlettered oaf got into Julian's class -
who begins to suspect that his fellow-classicists are harboring a menacing
secret, as indeed they are.
Spurred by Julian's invocations of the irrational - "To sing, to
scream, to dance barefoot in the woods in the dead of night" - four of
the baby Dionysians enact a Bacchanalian orgy in the woods and acci–
dentally kill a farmer who stumbles upon their frenzied game. What
troubles them about this unforeseen complication is nothing so mundane
as guilt or remorse, but the fear of being found out. When Bunny sus–
pects the truth and threatens to expose them, the adorable aesthetes lure
him to a remote precipice and send him crashing to his death.
