Southern Gothic revenge
Anita Brookner
THE LITTLE FRIEND by Donna Tartt Bloomsbury. £16.99, pp. 555,
ISBN 0747562113 The Secret History', Donna Tartt's first novel, marked the most astonishing literary debut of 1992. Its hermetic excitement, its remote intensity were unlike anything produced either in that year or indeed since then. The Little Friend, eagerly awaited, strictly embargoed until publication date,
comes garlanded with advance praise and accompanied by a full programme of author appearances and readings.
Whether this anticipation will be justified is not easy to say. The Little Friend bears all the marks of the conscientiously written second novel, together with acknowledgments to the many people who have supported the author in her heroic attempt to capitalise on the absolute authority so effortlessly achieved in The Secret History. Inevitably there will be some disappointment, which may not be Donna Tartt's fault. The climate of novel writing — and reading — was more accommodating in 1992 than it is today. The aftermath of recent and indeed ongoing terrorist attacks has had a strange but observable effect, namely to divert attention from fiction to reality, so that hitherto addictive readers feel a certain impatience with fictional diversions and more eager to invest in their own lives than in those whose reality, is more fragile and less verifiable. I imagine that The Little Friend will reach a readership less indulgent of extravagant effects, even less indulgent towards the lives delineated with such wordy elaboration as those of the Dufresnes of Alexandria, Mississippi who form the subject of The Little Friend.
Even the title is misleading. Those expecting an exploration of childhood fantasy will come up against full-blown Southern Gothic, with echoes of The Famous Five and perhaps of Gone with the Wind. The story is set up as an adventure, in which two children, a girl of 12 and a boy of 11, attempt to solve a mystery that took place in the remote infancy of Harriet Dufresnes, whose nine-year-old brother, Robin, was found hanging from a tree in the family garden and whose killer — for it was unthinkable that this could have been a suicide — has never been discovered. But before the children. Harriet and Hely, can embark on their investigation, we are introduced to a panorama of life in this small Southern town and to a cast of characters who, although weightless, are distinctly unusual. Some of the outlines of these people are recognisable from what we think we know or have read about life in the deep South: the black servant running the household, the faded mother, the noisy, hyperactive father, the gentility of the older generation, but also the snake-handling revivalist preachers, the criminal pastimes of the underclass, the valorous attempts to carry on a tradition that began in the big house, named not Tara but Tribulation, and the unexamined interior lives of those marked by the tragedy of the boy's death, their attempts to escape it, and their ineradicable denial. Such determination as there is belongs to the older generation, to Harriet's grandmother and her three greataunts who maintain a semblance of family life. Indeed the child Harriet is often obliged to eat in their houses as their own mother has taken to her bed and subsists on peppermint ice-cream. Nor are the daughters any more reassuring. Allison, the elder, is pretty, quiet, and not too bright; Harriet is fierce, taciturn, dirty and neglected, but it is she who is determined to solve the mystery of her brother's death. Suspicion falls quite naturally on the Ratliff brothers, dissolute and almost cretinous boys given to shooting at schoolchildren fishing in the lake, harbouring visiting drifters who preach the gospel in the open air and perform the snake-handling when the spirit moves them, and are adept at amassing guns, of which they have a considerable arsenal. But then so does Harriet: guns are the currency of this community and are likely to disrupt any activity. One might ask whether a 12year-old girl who likes to read Kipling and Conan Doyle is really equipped to solve a mystery when she is up against the overwhelming moral slackness that distinguishes Alexandria. But we too have reading on our side and we know how much ingenious 12-year-olds can achieve. We might, however, have wished for a more expansive companion than Harriet, whose general unpreparedness is expressed in terms of strange, unfocussed behaviour: she is allowed, for instance, to stay up all night, to go out unaccompanied at all times, and, less forgivably, to snub her friend Hely who worships her. General question: these children are pubescent but show no signs of enquiry. Will they ever grow up? Meanwhile Donna Tartt is about her business, elaborating on her milieu, bringing in the weather and the vegetation, and the few other characters who populate this town but have no part to play in its story. She achieves some alarming effects, notably when Harriet and Hely penetrate a house occupied by one of the Ratliff brothers and are endangered by a full complement of poisonous snakes, brought along to demonstrate the Lord's power. This is genuinely frightening, and the novel at this point becomes authentic, as perhaps it has failed to do in episodes similarly set up, such as the altercation in the pool hall, rich with dialect, and the strange lost child who
appears from time to time. There is a law lessness in the novel which extends to all the characters, and it must be said that,
although Donna Tartt's capacity is never in doubt, her encompassing overview does the plot no favours, allowing in diversions and digressions which she deals with authoritatively but which may reveal a determination to succeed on her own terms, however much these prove frustrating to the reader. The children's misguided attempts at revenge, or rather retribution, by way of a king cobra dropped from a height through the open roof of Danny Ratliff's car, hint at the peculiar extravagance of this narrative,
in which every bush, every wall, every tree is itemised, but in which the broader outlines occasionally fail to cohere. It is all
horribly persuasive, yet at the same time not quite convincing, and one's reaction is one of bewilderment as much as of respect. Respect is unavoidable, for the proliferating invention if not for the merciless detail.
The author seems to have paced all these streets, recoiled from all those flies in the line of duty, yet at the same time failed to distance herself from what eventually turns into a maze in which the reader is imprisoned. Just how much the writer herself felt
imprisoned is hard to say. There is genuine mastery in her ability to come to terms with the almost unmanageable mass of the novel, which becomes more quaint, more indigenous by the page. The revenge motif is almost lost, surfacing briefly in attempts at murder which amount to very little. Even as children Harriet and Hely are inventive only in disappointing ways, less inventive, in fact, than Harriet's grandmother and great-aunts, who carry on a bland, blind continuation of the customs that prevailed when they themselves were young. It comes as something of a relief when adult concerns — the dismissal of a beloved servant, an accident, a death — take over, although these too have a distancing effect. There is a shadow in the form of Danny Ratliff, who sees Harriet in the back of a car at her great-aunt's funeral. Suddenly (but we have been led to this point) the discordant, meandering strands coalesce. The terrifying closing chapters, in which anything can and does happen, are worth all the preceding pages put together. Suspense, of a physically uncomfortable intensity, brings the story to its conclusion. A question remains. Who is the little friend? Is it Harriet with her desire to exact justice for her dead brother, whom she never knew? Is it Hely, who unwittingly gets rid of some awkward evidence and is there to do Harriet's bidding? Or, more likely, is it Danny Ratliff, who has dim memories of a birthday party to which he was invited but to which he was too poor to bring a present? The curious miasma of physical and spiritual sickness that rises from these 500-odd pages precludes any kind of straight answer. It is as if the whole extraordinary exercise has been designed to exact its own punishment by a writer so far out of the ordinary that she can be compared to no one else. The Little Friend is good, very good; it is undeniably superior. But I doubt if I shall want to read it a second time.
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