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A review by storytold
The Little Friend by Donna Tartt
2.0
Donna Tartt always has a project in mind for her novels, and I was determined to figure out what her project for this one was. If I wasn't so determined, I wouldn't have finished the book. It took me the better part of five weeks to get through, and I don't think I can recommend the book to anyone. But what it sets out to do, in respects, it achieves with grace.
Tartt herself grew up in Mississippi in the 1970s with a father she disliked, and the character of Harriet bears striking resemblance to how Tartt continues to look today. It stands to reason that Tartt is likely writing what she knows of home. Without doing any research on it, I suspect this was her attempt at The American Classic: the way The Secret History was Odyssean, and The Goldfinch was Dickensian, this may be meant to exist in the tradition of Huck Finn and To Kill a Mockingbird: stories about economic and structural inequality in the American South.
The problem was that Donna Tartt's American Classic, like The Goldfinch, should be 300 pages shorter, and if it's going to be 650 pages the ending had better be a hell of a lot more satisfying than this one was. I saw evidence of the scaffolding leading to the Chapter 7 climax long before the storylines combined, and I was able to hold out waiting for them to run into each other, but I was expecting a much stronger impact than what we got. Come to think of it, I had this exact problem with The Secret History: the actual last fifty pages were aggressively underwhelming to the point where I was initially starting this review with a two-star rating. No questions were answered. I didn't need the mystery posed in the first chapter to be solved, but the number of loose ends so outnumber the tied ones that I turned to the Acknowledgments page wondering if my ebook copy was missing an entire chapter. I still haven't ruled that possibility out.
But I have a rubric to follow when I'm waffling on a rating, and this wins out with three stars because prose, style, and setting are all so well developed. Tartt is an excellent and historical mimic, and there were several signs of literary mimickry in the text. The action scenes with their ellipses trailing off at the end of paragraphs, the way—when distraught—Harriet's thoughts would repeat a name or a single word with an exclamation mark—Libby! I'm just not well read enough to know who she's imitating, and I'm sure I'll be thinking about this book for a long time trying to figure it out.
The book's first chapter sets it up completely on the wrong foot, and I think it was a mistake to open with a full summary of those events rather than reference them in flashbacks. There are also countless red herrings in this book as to what might be relevant to the plot, and every time I remember a new one, I get mad. It's way overwritten, and unlike The Goldfinch, it's not really building toward any kind of satisfactory ending. The events end; the characters' lives go on; a story was told. Maybe that's enough for a book to be, but I definitely expected at least some degree of narrative satisfaction.
ETA: I changed my mind and bumped it down to two stars again. I get so darn mad!
Tartt herself grew up in Mississippi in the 1970s with a father she disliked, and the character of Harriet bears striking resemblance to how Tartt continues to look today. It stands to reason that Tartt is likely writing what she knows of home. Without doing any research on it, I suspect this was her attempt at The American Classic: the way The Secret History was Odyssean, and The Goldfinch was Dickensian, this may be meant to exist in the tradition of Huck Finn and To Kill a Mockingbird: stories about economic and structural inequality in the American South.
The problem was that Donna Tartt's American Classic, like The Goldfinch, should be 300 pages shorter, and if it's going to be 650 pages the ending had better be a hell of a lot more satisfying than this one was. I saw evidence of the scaffolding leading to the Chapter 7 climax long before the storylines combined, and I was able to hold out waiting for them to run into each other, but I was expecting a much stronger impact than what we got. Come to think of it, I had this exact problem with The Secret History: the actual last fifty pages were aggressively underwhelming to the point where I was initially starting this review with a two-star rating. No questions were answered. I didn't need the mystery posed in the first chapter to be solved, but the number of loose ends so outnumber the tied ones that I turned to the Acknowledgments page wondering if my ebook copy was missing an entire chapter. I still haven't ruled that possibility out.
But I have a rubric to follow when I'm waffling on a rating, and this wins out with three stars because prose, style, and setting are all so well developed. Tartt is an excellent and historical mimic, and there were several signs of literary mimickry in the text. The action scenes with their ellipses trailing off at the end of paragraphs, the way—when distraught—Harriet's thoughts would repeat a name or a single word with an exclamation mark—Libby! I'm just not well read enough to know who she's imitating, and I'm sure I'll be thinking about this book for a long time trying to figure it out.
The book's first chapter sets it up completely on the wrong foot, and I think it was a mistake to open with a full summary of those events rather than reference them in flashbacks. There are also countless red herrings in this book as to what might be relevant to the plot, and every time I remember a new one, I get mad. It's way overwritten, and unlike The Goldfinch, it's not really building toward any kind of satisfactory ending. The events end; the characters' lives go on; a story was told. Maybe that's enough for a book to be, but I definitely expected at least some degree of narrative satisfaction.
ETA: I changed my mind and bumped it down to two stars again. I get so darn mad!