The Little Friend: Donna Tartt

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Tartt also invests her with some odd precocity, capable of unchildlike sentiments such as: "Death, at least, was dignified: an end to dishonor and sorrow.") 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.

The Little Friend, however, wipes out. It is an extended prose catastrophe. (...) (S)he has strained hard, at the expense of plot and character, to create an air of unreality and has achieved ... a strained unreality." - Troy Patterson, Entertainment Weekly 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. Done with describing them she also generally does away with them, allowing them to fade out of the narrative for long stretches, out of sight.The father of the Ratliff brothers is described as being almost psychotically abusive towards his sons. Robin's eerie death, Harriet and Hely getting themselves into some scary situations, and the final confrontation between Danny and Harriet hold one rapt. 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 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. About Donna Tartt Written with an evocative sense of time and place, Tartt paints a rich picture of the decaying town in which the novel is set; a place that is ripe with casual and cruel racism, where the spectrum of social classes is divisive; and the thinking of the children and their fertile imaginations is front and centre of the story.

This is the sort of response Tartt gives often; she manages to be personally evasive by giving you an interesting, if convoluted, answer - but not really to your question. (She has a slightly disconcerting habit of keeping her eyes closed when she's talking to you, especially when she's struggling to make a point.) This evasiveness about her childhood is a surprise, because in 1992 - perhaps before she realised how big her celebrity would become - she wrote a beautiful, and very intimate, memoir of the time for Harper's magazine. It presents the story of a bizarre childhood. She was, she wrote, "too small to wear regular baby clothes", so was instead dressed in doll's clothes. "There exists a hilarious photograph of me lying in a crib and wearing, for an infant, an oddly sophisticated career-girl outfit," she writes. She describes how her great-grandfather, the great patriarch of her family, "had a nearly unlimited faith in the magic of pharmacy" and has spent the last years of his life constantly dosed up with antibiotics, "believing them to be a kind of healthful preventative, or nerve tonic". Christianity is referenced throughout the book in the form of snake handling preachers, Baptists, and Mormonism, as well as an epigraph attributed to Saint Thomas Aquinas. Danny is just coming into his own here, now an almost full-grown man, taking a more active role in the family businesses.The passage is telling: what an odd world Harriet must live in that here (at camp) she is confronted with this reality "for the first time ever". 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 ] verifyErrors }}{{ message }}{{ /verifyErrors }}{{

By the time you have been introduced to a small town peopled by leering white-trash psychopaths who have shot themselves in the eye and by tattooed preachers who reel off religious text while at the same time clumsily handling poisonous snakes, then you may sense that perhaps you are ringside at a circus whose performers were reared more in literature than they were in life. (…) It is when Tartt almost glancingly describes the daily, lethargic weight of the sorrow that affects a family torn apart by the death of its most wanted child that she reveals her extraordinary qualities." - David Hare, The Observer She started writing what would become The Secret History in her second year at Bennington. It was published in 1992 and has since been published in 24 languages. Her second novel, The Little Friend, was published a decade later in 2002. Her third novel, The Goldfinch, was published in 2013.Petty (and not so petty) criminals, they've also had their lives muddled and turned all around, most having spent time in prison.