This is a book I’ve mostly been familiar with through its descendants, so it’s been an interesting journey to trace those steps back and examine the source. I was definitely nervous to read this book, with how incredible polarizing it is, and honestly because I did NOT like The Goldfinch. But I was really truly pleasantly surprised, and found myself really appreciating this book more than I thought I would. 

 

It’s definitely incredibly long and exhaustive and, if I had the opportunity to edit this, I would be slashing whole paragraphs at times, but the writing is stunning. Tartt has such a tact in gracefully threading interpersonal dynamics throughout the background of this narrative. The characters are constantly malleable to the volatile and fragile relationships of their friend group, on and off-page, Tartt forcing the readers to do some leg work in examining the nuances to find the implications folded into the moments between the lines. 

 

The scaffolding of the Greek Tragedy within the story took a while for me to spot, as well as the help of a Reddit thread about big cats, but once it became clear, the relationship between this work and its roots really shone. 

 

I don’t think this will be a favorite book of mine. But it’s honestly one that impressed me more than I expected it to. (And it’s great having read it so that I can now argue that no, those books that people say are rip-offs of this book are NOT rip-offs of this book. This book is absolutely a springboard for successive staples in dark academia, but those books’ structures, techniques, and elements absolutely cover different ground and take on original shape untethered by Tartt’s work despite their clear genre ties and homages.) 

 

Also, as an early modernist, I was kinda jump scared by Richard’s pivot to early modern literature. 

 

CW: suicide, gun violence, drug use, animal death, character death, death, violence, blood & gore, alcohol, alcoholism, hospitalization, incest