The Little Friend: Donna Tartt

Product Information

That is until Robin's sister, Insufferable Genius Harriet who was only six months old at the time, decides she must solve the mystery of her brother's untimely death. In doing so she travels the lines of race and class in her hometown, discovers the sprawling history of her family, and draws the ire of the local Ratliff clan, the middle brother Danny of which she suspects is Robin's killer. Donna Tartt was born in 1963 in Greenwood, Mississippi. She was first published at the age of 13 in a Mississippi literary review. She enrolled in the University of Mississippi in 1981 where her writing caught the attention of writer Willie Morris. Based on his recommendation, she was admitted to a graduate short story course while still a freshman. At the suggestion of Morris and others she transferred to Bennington College in 1982, a private liberal arts college in Vermont. The novel won the WH Smith Literary Award [4] and was shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction in 2003. [5] Book Cover Design [ edit ]

Sinister Minister: Averted. Eugene Ratliff is often thought to be this because of his facial scars but is actually one of the more decent of the Ratliffs. She'd heard the stories so often that she knew them by heart, could repeat them if she wanted, sometimes even dash in a detail or two neglected in the retelling [...]. The stories were familiar much as stories from her mother's girlhood were familiar, or stories from books. But none of them seemed connected with her in any fundamental way.” For the rest of her life, Charlotte Cleve would blame herself for her son's death because she had decided to have the Mother's Day dinner at six in the evening instead of noon, after church, which is when the Cleves usually had it. One is semi-reformed and has turned to religion, a youngster is mentally retarded, but crime is still their leading way of life.

And–since this willful amnesia had kept Robin's death from being translated into that sweet old family vernacular which smoothed even the bitterest mysteries into comfortable, comprehensible form–the memory of that day's events had a chaotic, fragmented quality, bright mirror-shards of nightmare which flared at the smell of wisteria, the creaking of a clothes-line, a certain stormy cast of spring light.” Likewise, Robin's murderer remains at large at the end of the book, as Harriet never discovers who actually killed him.

The Little Friend is a 2002 novel written by Donna Tartt, following her immensely successful debut The Secret History a decade earlier. The Little Friend seems destined to become a special kind of classic ... It grips you like a fairy tale, but denies you the consoling assurance that it's all just make-believe." - The New York Times Book Review Was she making fun of me? (One thinks of Carraway of Gatsby: "For a moment I suspected that he was pulling my leg... My incredulity was submerged in fascination now; it was like skimming hastily through a dozen magazines." And Vanity Fair called her "a character of her own fictive creation".) Does she see herself like Henry in The Secret History, "a propagandist, routinely withholding information, leaking it only when it served his purpose"? Another (former) friend says that "she seems to have a natural love of intrigue", and you wonder if this myth-making and mysterious self-creation are to protect the creative process, or are just her being a storyteller. Self-consciously writerly. Harriet's family is essentially all womenfolk; it contrasts with the other clan that dominates the novel, Danny Ratliff's family, a group of misfits that is almost entirely male.There are none of the aesthetic sweeteners of The Secret History here, none of its beautiful people and elegant plotting. In some ways it feels like a deliberate reaction to Tartt's first work. If The Secret History had one striking fault, it was the way the violence occurred so easily, even stylishly. There is a great deal of violence in The Little Friend, and it is executed in a very different style: bloody and unglamorised, with apparently endless repercussions of guilt and misery.

Harriet is the central character in the book, an intense, bookish girl who made the kids who were devoted to her play Joan of Arc and Crusades and the Last Supper (where she assumed the role of Jesus). One wonders what Tartt thinks of The Secret History now; it's such a different, more populist, book. "I hadn't read it for 10 years, and just recently I read it aloud, unabridged, the whole thing for a recording - it took 14 days, a marathon," she says. "It seemed quite alien, like something I didn't quite write. But what I remembered very clearly was where I was when I was writing this particular part - staying at a friend's house, the view out the window. It caught me very vividly." Did she like the novel? "There are some good things about it. But there are some things about it too when I just think: oh no! Some parts were really hard to read aloud, that bothered me terribly. One wasn't as good technically then, in terms of constructing things. I see loose ends that I would never have allowed in the new book. It's natural. In 10 years you learn to be better at working." She possessed, to a singular and uncomfortable degree, the narrowness of vision which enabled all the Cleves to forget what they didn’t want to remember, and to exaggerate or otherwise alter what they couldn’t forget; and in restringing the skeleton of the extinct monstrosity which had been her family’s fortune, she was unaware that some of the bones had been tampered with; that others belonged to different animals entirely; that a great many of the more massive and spectacular bones were not bones at all, but plaster-of-paris forgeries” As to the book's title, its meaning is dramatically (?) revealed near the conclusion -- but is obvious almost from the get-go. Harriet's father, Dixon, visits her while she is recovering from her ordeal in hospital and reveals that Danny had in fact been Robin's "little friend" and was distraught when he heard of Robin's death. The authorities never discover Harriet and Hely's involvement with the Ratliffs, as her doctors consider her condition to be the result of an epileptic episode.Parental Neglect: For most of the novel, Harriet's mother is depressed and functionally useless and her father is entirely absent.