The Little Friend by Donna Tartt

From Barnes & Noble

The Barnes & Noble Review
Ten years after her astonishing debut novel, The Secret History, Donna Tartt's The Little Friend -- an absorbing, beautifully written account of murder and its consequences -- is a successful follow-up that reaffirms Tartt's talent.

The narrative takes place in Mississippi in the late 1970s, but the central event occurs twelve years earlier, when nine-year-old Robin Dufresnes is found hanging from a tree in his own back yard. Robin's murder, which is never solved, virtually destroys his family. Years later, twelve-year-old Harriet Dufresnes -- who was an infant when Robin died and who is haunted by images of the brother she never knew -- sets out to locate his killer.

Harriet's quest becomes a meditation on grief, obsession, and revenge. When Harriet identifies a likely suspect -- Danny Ratliffe, a drug-addled member of an impoverished redneck family -- she pursues him with a remorseless, sometimes appalling, single-mindedness. As the long, leisurely narrative unfolds, Tartt presents a cumulatively compelling portrait of a rural Southern community and of two deeply damaged families -- the Dufresnes and the Ratliffes -- whose destinies become intertwined in unpredictable ways.

Tartt is a natural storyteller and a masterful stylist whose precise, evocative descriptions of people, landscapes, and events are both convincing and hypnotic. At the same time, she displays an uncommon facility for the gothic and macabre, and her novel is filled with horrific, sometimes grotesque flourishes, such as an unforgettable encounter between an elderly woman and a kidnapped king cobra. Alternately dark, funny, sorrowful, and surprising, The Little Friend is a worthy successor to The Secret History. Bill Sheehan

From the Publisher

Bestselling author Donna Tartt returns with a grandly ambitious and utterly riveting novel of childhood, innocence and evil.
The setting is Alexandria, Mississippi, where one Mother’s Day a little boy named Robin Cleve Dufresnes was found hanging from a tree in his parents’ yard. Twelve years later Robin’s murder is still unsolved and his family remains devastated. So it is that Robin’s sister Harriet—unnervingly bright, insufferably determined, and unduly influenced by the fiction of Kipling and Robert Louis Stevenson--sets out to unmask his killer. Aided only by her worshipful friend Hely, Harriet crosses her town’s rigid lines of race and caste and burrows deep into her family’s history of loss. Filled with hairpin turns of plot and “a bustling, ridiculous humanity worthy of Dickens” (The New York Times Book Review), The Little Friend is a work of myriad enchantments by a writer of prodigious talent.

The New York Times Book Review

The Little Friend might be described as a young-adult novel for grown-ups, since it can carry us back to the breathless state of adolescent literary discovery, when we read to be terrified beyond measure and, through our terror, to try to figure out the world and our place in it.

Book Magazine

Donna Tartt is a writer who seems to thrive on countering norms and expectations. She published her first novel in 1992, while the ink on her Bennington College diploma was still wet. The Secret History , a heated-up tale of murder and cultism at a very Bennington-like campus, was a publishing phenomenon, gaining an enormous popular success even as it posted respectable scores on the literary charts. Tartt earned instant Brat-pack status, and a whole generation of readers awaited the inevitable cash-in follow-up. Which then, confoundingly, did not and did not come.

Now, at last, a full decade later—and in an entertainment culture like ours, a decade is a lifetime—Tartt delivers The Little Friend , a vast, thickly woven and defyingly unchic work of immersed imagination. The novel is nothing anyone could have predicted.

Most contemporary novelists have forsworn accretions of atmosphere in favor of edgy sketches of the Cultural Now. Not Donna Tartt. Indeed, the first few hundred pages of The Little Friend are almost nothing but background and atmosphere. I mean nothing pejorative—not yet. The dense, steamy mood of a small-town Mississippi summer blends together beautifully with Tartt's extraordinarily patient evocation of the inwardness of twelve-year-old Harriet Cleve.

Gawky, rough-edged, stubborn, afloat in her bookishness and braced against the vast sorrows of family life, Harriet is the least likely of heroines. Yet page by page, as we take in the story of her family's tragedy—the unsolved hanging death of her older brother Robin when she was a very young girl—we grasp the extent of her resilience, that quality that generations ago was known as "pluck."Harriet is the family's one true survivor. Her father has absented himself altogether, working a job in another town; her mother lives in a medicated trance, barely stirring the air as she moves from room to room; and her teenage sister spends most of her time staring into the televisual beyond. There remains only a crew of eccentric aunts, presided over by the formidably peppery Edie, to supply the sustaining vibrations of familial domesticity.

Slowly, the novel gathers its momentum. Her spirit all but annihilated by the despairing inertia that surrounds her, but now feeling the first surges of adult independence, Harriet begins to dream a task, a meaning for herself. One day, impetuously, she inscribes "Goals for Summer" on a fresh page of her notebook. Writes Tartt: "Restlessly, she stared at this. Like the woodcutter's child at the beginning of a fairy tale, a mysterious longing had possessed her, a desire to travel far and do great things; and though she could not say exactly what it was she wanted to do, she knew that it was something grand and gloomy and extremely difficult."

Soon after, Harriet has her realization: Not only was her brother murdered, but she knows who did it. Fixing her suspicions on a former schoolmate of Robin's, one of a network of local ne'er-do-well brothers, she makes it her summer's mission to avenge Robin's death, and to that end enlists her friend Hely, a boy almost as far gone in adventuring fantasies as she is.

As much as I deplore the facile "X meets Y" blurb-generating machine, I will confess that as The Little Friend caught its narrative stride, as Harriet and Hely began poking their noses into the various sordid doings they had unearthed—hiding, spying, eavesdropping—I kept thinking (strike me dead!) "Nancy Drew meets Harper Lee." For from that point on, The Little Friend seems to change not just its narrative mode, but also its deepest fundamental thrust, moving from almost inert brooding to what feels like an atmosphere-freighted adventure story. Alternating sections now give glimpses of the sordid comings-and-goings of the suspect and his unsavory kin. Here we are in the world of the Southern grotesque, among characters we might have met in the works of Flannery O'Connor or the more venomous recent fiction of Barry Hannah. We catch the stench of evil, look into lives lived past all hope of redemption. As Harriet's bravado encroaches on the genuinely dangerous, confrontation becomes inevitable and then, with strong cinematic flourishes, happens. The question is whether the shift from mood-centered scenes to action-driven plot works.

To my mind, it doesn't, not completely. The transition is too dramatic, and the cops-and-robbers contrivances—the clichés of that genre of suspense narrative—overwhelm what had been a complex, if slow-moving exploration of the deep undercurrents of family life and the ongoing abrasions of trauma. Still, Tartt writes with confident mastery in both modes—she has matured considerably as a stylist since The Secret History —and this carefully layered portrait of a remarkable girl's chrysalis summer offers enough substance to gratify the most impatient of her fans. This may not be a novel that is passed from hand to hand with the "You've got to read this" injunction, but in terms of Tartt's reputation among more serious readers, that may be a good thing. —Sven Birkerts

Book Magazine

Donna Tartt is a writer who seems to thrive on countering norms and expectations. She published her first novel in 1992, while the ink on her Bennington College diploma was still wet. The Secret History, a heated-up tale of murder and cultism at a very Bennington-like campus, was a publishing phenomenon, gaining an enormous popular success even as it posted respectable scores on the literary charts. Tartt earned instant Brat-pack status, and a whole generation of readers awaited the inevitable cash-in follow-up. Which then, confoundingly, did not and did not come.

Now, at last, a full decade later—and in an entertainment culture like ours, a decade is a lifetime—Tartt delivers The Little Friend, a vast, thickly woven and defyingly unchic work of immersed imagination. The novel is nothing anyone could have predicted.

Most contemporary novelists have forsworn accretions of atmosphere in favor of edgy sketches of the Cultural Now. Not Donna Tartt. Indeed, the first few hundred pages of The Little Friend are almost nothing but background and atmosphere. I mean nothing pejorative—not yet. The dense, steamy mood of a small-town Mississippi summer blends together beautifully with Tartt's extraordinarily patient evocation of the inwardness of twelve-year-old Harriet Cleve.

Gawky, rough-edged, stubborn, afloat in her bookishness and braced against the vast sorrows of family life, Harriet is the least likely of heroines. Yet page by page, as we take in the story of her family's tragedy—the unsolved hanging death of her older brother Robin when she was a very young girl—we grasp the extent of her resilience, that quality that generations agowas known as "pluck." Harriet is the family's one true survivor. Her father has absented himself altogether, working a job in another town; her mother lives in a medicated trance, barely stirring the air as she moves from room to room; and her teenage sister spends most of her time staring into the televisual beyond. There remains only a crew of eccentric aunts, presided over by the formidably peppery Edie, to supply the sustaining vibrations of familial domesticity.

Slowly, the novel gathers its momentum. Her spirit all but annihilated by the despairing inertia that surrounds her, but now feeling the first surges of adult independence, Harriet begins to dream a task, a meaning for herself. One day, impetuously, she inscribes "Goals for Summer" on a fresh page of her notebook. Writes Tartt: "Restlessly, she stared at this. Like the woodcutter's child at the beginning of a fairy tale, a mysterious longing had possessed her, a desire to travel far and do great things; and though she could not say exactly what it was she wanted to do, she knew that it was something grand and gloomy and extremely difficult."

Soon after, Harriet has her realization: Not only was her brother murdered, but she knows who did it. Fixing her suspicions on a former schoolmate of Robin's, one of a network of local ne'er-do-well brothers, she makes it her summer's mission to avenge Robin's death, and to that end enlists her friend Hely, a boy almost as far gone in adventuring fantasies as she is.

As much as I deplore the facile "X meets Y" blurb-generating machine, I will confess that as The Little Friend caught its narrative stride, as Harriet and Hely began poking their noses into the various sordid doings they had unearthed—hiding, spying, eavesdropping—I kept thinking (strike me dead!) "Nancy Drew meets Harper Lee." For from that point on, The Little Friend seems to change not just its narrative mode, but also its deepest fundamental thrust, moving from almost inert brooding to what feels like an atmosphere-freighted adventure story. Alternating sections now give glimpses of the sordid comings-and-goings of the suspect and his unsavory kin. Here we are in the world of the Southern grotesque, among characters we might have met in the works of Flannery O'Connor or the more venomous recent fiction of Barry Hannah. We catch the stench of evil, look into lives lived past all hope of redemption. As Harriet's bravado encroaches on the genuinely dangerous, confrontation becomes inevitable and then, with strong cinematic flourishes, happens. The question is whether the shift from mood-centered scenes to action-driven plot works.

To my mind, it doesn't, not completely. The transition is too dramatic, and the cops-and-robbers contrivances—the clichés of that genre of suspense narrative—overwhelm what had been a complex, if slow-moving exploration of the deep undercurrents of family life and the ongoing abrasions of trauma. Still, Tartt writes with confident mastery in both modes—she has matured considerably as a stylist since The Secret History—and this carefully layered portrait of a remarkable girl's chrysalis summer offers enough substance to gratify the most impatient of her fans. This may not be a novel that is passed from hand to hand with the "You've got to read this" injunction, but in terms of Tartt's reputation among more serious readers, that may be a good thing.

Publishers Weekly

Widely anticipated over the decade since her debut in The Secret History, Tartt's second novel confirms her talent as a superb storyteller, sophisticated observer of human nature and keen appraiser of ethics and morality. If the theme of The Secret History was intellectual arrogance, here it is dangerous innocence. The death of nine-year-old Robin Cleve Dufresnes, found hanging from a tree in his own backyard in Alexandria, Miss., has never been solved. The crime destroyed his family: it turned his mother into a lethargic recluse; his father left town; and the surviving siblings, Allison and Harriet, are now, 12 years later-it is the early '70s-largely being raised by their black maid and a matriarchy of female relatives headed by their domineering grandmother and her three sisters. Although every character is sharply etched, 12-year-old Harriet-smart, stubborn, willful-is as vivid as a torchlight. Like many preadolescents, she's fascinated by secrets. She vows to solve the mystery of her brother's death and unmask the killer, whom she decides, without a shred of evidence, is Danny Ratliff, a member of a degenerate, redneck family of hardened criminals. (The Ratliff brothers are good to their grandmother, however; their solicitude at times lends the novel the antic atmosphere of a Booth cartoon.) Harriet's pursuit of Danny, at first comic, gathers fateful impetus as she and her best friend, Hely, stalk the Ratliffs, and eventually, as the plot attains the suspense level of a thriller, leads her into mortal danger. Harriet learns about betrayal, guilt and loss, and crosses the threshold into an irrevocable knowledge of true evil. If Tartt wandered into melodrama in The Secret History, this time she's achieved perfect control over her material, melding suspense, character study and social background. Her knowledge of Southern ethos-the importance of family, of heritage, of race and class-is central to the plot, as is her take on Southerners' ability to construct a repertoire, veering toward mythology, of tales of the past. The double standard of justice in a racially segregated community is subtly reinforced, and while Tartt's portrait of the maid, Ida Rhew, evokes a stereotype, Tartt adds the dimension of bitter pride to Ida's character. In her first novel, Tartt unveiled a formidable intelligence. The Little Friend flowers with emotional insight, a gift for comedy and a sure sense of pacing. Wisely, this novel eschews a feel-good resolution. What it does provide is an immensely satisfying reading experience. Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

Nola Theiss - KLIATT

Tartt's first novel, A Secret History, was a surprise bestseller. This one is just as long and complex as her first, but it takes place in the South and her characters are younger. Her main character is a 12-year-old girl named Harriet Cleve whose 9-year-old brother was murdered in their backyard on Mother's Day when Harriet was just a baby. That tragedy has haunted the family for years and this book is about her quest to figure out the killer's identity. The story is filled with strange characters, many of whom Harriett is related to, as well as a weird family of crooks, snake handlers and bad guys. There is something Dickensonian about both Tartt's plot and her characters and Harriet will probably remind you of Scout in To Kill a Mockingbird, as well. There are sections of the book where Tartt seems to have enjoyed writing so much, she wrote too much, but otherwise it is a good read. KLIATT Codes: SA-Recommended for senior high school students, advanced students, and adults. 2002, Random House, 624p., Ages 15 to adult.

Library Journal

It has been a decade since Tartt blazed forth with The Secret History, but it was worth the wait. Set in small-town Mississippi, her new work centers on the family of Harriet Cleve, shattered forever after the murder by hanging of Harriet's nine-year-old brother, Robin, when Harriet was still a baby. Harriet's mother has withdrawn, her father has left town (though he still supports the family), and Harriet and sister Allison are essentially raised by their redoubtable grandmother, Edie, and a gaggle of aunts who, though mostly married, are ultimately "spinsters at heart." Harriet grows up an ornery and precocious child who at age 12 determines that she will finally uncover her brother's murderer. Whether or not she solves the crime is hardly the point; what matters here is the writing-dense, luscious, and exact-and Tartt's ability to reconstruct the life of this family in vivid detail. Harriet in particular is an extraordinary creation; she's a believable child who is also persuasively wise beyond her years. That debut was no fluke; highly recommended. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 6/1/02.]-Barbara Hoffert, "Library Journal" Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

The successor to Tartt's wildly successful debut (The Secret History, 1992) is another ambitious dark-hued melodrama-destined for big sales, though it's an intermittently creaky performance. The burden of sorrow that afflicts the family of a murdered child, an introspective preadolescent turned avenger and detective, and a clan of redneck malcontents who make Faulkner's Snopeses look like the Sitwells are among the lurid materials tossed amiably together in this very long, very overheated, yet absorbing novel. It begins magnificently, with a tense prologue that describes the discovery of nine-year-old Robin Dufresnes's hanged body on a hot Mother's Day afternoon in a small Mississippi town. The story then leaps ahead 12 years, to show us Robin's mother Charlotte still paralyzed by grief, his sister Allison (unable to remember what she alone presumably witnessed) sleeping 16 hours a day, and her younger sister Harriet-bookish and virtually friendless-persuaded that she knows who killed her brother (the murder was never solved), and how to punish him. Tartt whips up a townful of vivid eccentrics (prominent among them are the Dufresnes girls' four unmarried great-aunts, from whom Harriet solicits details about their family's hushed-up history), creating a rich backdrop against which Harriet and her partner in intrigue, an ingenuous boy named Hely Hull (who adores her), evade embarrassments like church camp and parental discipline, eavesdrop on a passel of sinister snake-handlers (thereby discovering the perfect instrument of revenge), and pit themselves against the local white-trash Ratliff brothers, led by murderous psychopath Farish, who conceals the amphetamines he produces in a remotewater tower. Despite an overload of staggered false climaxes, it's all quite irrationally entertaining. Direct allusions and glancing references alike make clear that The Little Friend is Tartt's homage to the romantic adventure novels of Twain and Stevenson-and, for much of its length, a rather bald-faced imitation of To Kill a Mockingbird. Still, the characters are gritty and appealing, and the story holds you throughout. Tartt appears to have struck gold once again.

Product Details

• Interviews & Essays
• Reading Group Guide
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Interviews & Essays

Reading Group Guide

1. The prologue offers glimpses of the household before Robin's body is discovered. What do the descriptions of Charlotte, Edie, the great-aunts, and Ida Rhew show about the individual characters and the family dynamics? Do the reactions of Charlotte and Edie to the tragedy simply reinforce an established pattern or does a more profound change occur? How do their stories about Robin—their "exquisite delineation of his character—painstakingly ornamented over a number of years" [p. 19]—differ from their embellished and often improvised memories of life at Tribulation and other family stories?

2. Tartt writes "From the time she was old enough to talk, Harriet had been a slightly distressing presence in the Cleve household. . . . Harriet was not disobedient, exactly, or unruly, but she was haughty and somehow managed to irritate nearly every adult with whom she came in contact" [pp. 27–28]. Does Harriett live up to this description? Does she change over the course of the novel?

3. "She did not care for children's books in which the children grew up, as what ‘growing up' entailed (in lifeas in books) was a swift and inexplicable dwindling of character" [p. 157]. How do the adventure stories Harriet prefers inform her notions of what "growing up" entails? What does her choice of books reveal about her perceptions of how the world works and the things she will need to survive? Does she have a greater understanding of the adult world than most children her age?

4. The elderly Cleve sisters all have clear places in the family's self-portrait. Edie, for example, "was both field marshal and autocrat, the person of greatest power in the family and the person most likely to act" [p. 28]. Do the other sisters fall as easily into general characterizations? Are Charlotte, Allison, and Harriet contemporary versions of the older generation? How do Tartt's descriptions of minor characters like Mrs. Fountain [pp. 33–35] and Hely's mother [pp. 212–14] help to bring the central female figures into sharper focus?

5. "Because her father was so quarrelsome and disruptive, and so dissatisfied with everything, it seemed right to Harriet that he did not live at home" [p. 68]. Why does Harriet see her father in such a stark, uncompromising way? What insight does this offer into Harriet's approach to her emotions and her experiences? Are there incidents in the novel that present a different, more sympathetic view of Dix?

6. Harriet pieces together her case against Danny Ratliff from conversations with Pemberton Hull [pp. 105–108] and Ida Rhew [pp. 143–50], information she's gleaned from local newspapers, and "random little scraps she'd picked up here and there over the years" [p. 119]. Does the evidence Harriet collects provide convincing proof of Danny's guilt? What factors contribute to Harriet's confidence that she has solved the mystery of Robin's death? What makes Harriet decide to track down Robin's killer? Does Harriet understand the emotions that trigger her need to find Robin's killer? Why is she so sure that Danny is guilty of the crime? How valid is her reasoning and where does it fall apart?

7. How do the physical settings help to establish the social landscape of the novel? Why does Tartt call Tribulation an "extinct colossus" [p. 43], for example? What is the significance of the mounting chaos and disarray in Harriet's own home? What does the new housing development, Oak Lawn Estates [pp. 165–66], represent?

8. The account of Harriet and Hely's attempt to steal a poisonous snake from Eugene's apartment and their confrontation with the Ratliff brothers [pp. 300–330] is almost unbearably frightening and intense. What devices does Tartt use to build and sustain the suspense?

9. A collection of misfits, fanatics, and criminals, the Ratliff family seems to embody Edie's view of the white underclass: "The poor white has nothing to blame for his station but his own character. Well, of course, that won't do. That would mean having to assume some responsibility for his own laziness and sorry behavior" [p. 146]. Do the portraits of the Ratliff brothers reinforce or belie Edie's assumptions? What redeeming characteristics do Danny and Eugene have and how does Tartt make them apparent? Why has Tartt included Curtis in the family? How does his presence add to our understanding of the family?

10. A strong matriarch presides over both Harriet's family and the Ratliffs. What qualities do Edie and Gum have in common? How does each exercise her power? To what extent are their approaches to life defined by their social status and personal experiences? Does Gum's own life, for example, justify "the main lesson she had drilled into her grandsons: not to expect much from the world" [p. 357]? In what ways do the lessons Edie imposes, either explicitly or implicitly, reflect her own strengths and weaknesses? What comparisons can be drawn between Danny and Harriet's families and, in particular, between Danny and Harriet themselves?

11. Why does Ida Rhew play such a critical role in Harriet's life? How does Ida's position in the household illuminate the shortcomings not only of Charlotte, but of the other adults in Harriet's life? How do the family's reaction to her departure and Ida's response to being fired [pp. 357–67] undermine Harriet's vision of her world? In what ways do the emotions she experiences reflect both her perspective as a child and her emerging awareness and acceptance of adult uncertainties and moral ambiguities?

12. What do you make of the end of the novel? Hely thinks, "The mission was accomplished, the battle won; somehow—incredibly—she had done exactly what she said she would, and got away with the whole thing" [p. 624]. Harriet decides "She'd learned things she never knew, things she had no idea of knowing, and yet in a strange way it was the hidden message of Captain Scott, the part of the story she's never seen until now: that victory and collapse were sometimes the same thing" [p. 544]. What do you think of these two very different assessments? How do they reflect the natures of the two characters? Does it matter that Robin's murder remains unsolved or do you accept, as Libby says, that "the world is full of things we don't understand" [p. 140]?

13. The Little Friend explores the relationships between blacks and whites in Alexandria from several perspectives. The blatant racism of the Ratliffs is clearly shown in such incidents as the shooting at the river [p. 142]. In which ways does Harriet's family also exhibit a deep-seated, if more subtle, strain of racial prejudice? Is Harriet's shocked reaction to Ida's story about the church burning [pp. 146–47] a sign of her naiveté or does it reveal a sense of morality that distinguishes her (and by extension, her peers) from past generations?

14. The novel begins with stretches of long, languorous prose but later the pace quickens. What techniques does Tartt use to achieve this?

15. The term "Southern Gothic" is often used to describe writing set in the American South, from Tennessee Williams' and Carson McCullers' tales of families shaped by tragedy, insanity, and alcoholism to Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicles. Are there elements in The Little Friend that can be described as Southern Gothic and, if so, what are they? Were you reminded of other literary styles or authors while reading the book?

16. The novel's epigraphs come from St. Thomas Aquinas and Harry Houdini. Why is this rather odd coupling of a religious scholar and saint and a magician appropriate to the story Tartt tells? What lesson is implicit in both quotations? Has Harriet gained "the slenderest knowledge of the highest things" by the novel's end?

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