The Little Friend
By Donna Tartt
Knopf, 555 pages, $26
The Little Friend,” Donna Tartt’s new novel, draws deliberately and openly on the whole Southern Gothic tradition. If she hadn’t meant for that to be noticed, she probably wouldn’t have consented to pose for a recent Newsweek spread in the style of Truman Capote’s famous reclining-odalisque book-jacket photo–a shot that was itself a fine blend of parody and deliciously unapologetic vanity. Tartt is a rightful heir to the tradition she invokes: She was born and raised in the Deep South (Greenwood, Miss.), and her occasional memoirs recount a childhood with Gothic features the most ingenious novelist would be hard-pressed to invent.
Moreover, she is simply a much stronger, richer, deeper writer than just about any other realist of her generation, Southern or not. She is a strong enough writer to absorb the achievements of Capote, Eudora Welty, Carson McCullers and Flannery O’Connor (to name just a few) and synthesize them into a style that seems thoroughly her own.
“The Little Friend” is full of gestures toward its predecessors in children’s and adult literary fiction. The big action sequence at the end, for example, reprises a climax of Robert Louis Stevenson’s “Treasure Island” as precisely and self-consciously as Tartt’s Newsweek pose reprises the Capote photograph. When Tartt’s hero, 12-year-old Harriet Dufresne, tries to shoot Danny Ratliff, the drug dealer who has pursued her to the top of an abandoned water tower, it’s a near-perfect duplication of the moment when Stevenson’s child-hero, Jim Hawkins, shoots pirate Israel Hands from the top of the mast where Hands has pursued him–and even Harriet knows it.
But more than any other single work, “The Little Friend” takes for its template Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird,” with which it shares the same approximate period, the same sleepy, small-town Southern setting, a precociously intelligent little girl for a hero and the premise of a group of smart children trying to solve a mystery that’s not what it appears to be to them. What “The Little Friend” quite pointedly does not share with “To Kill a Mockingbird” is the somewhat cloying sweetness of Lee’s tone, the background of a struggle for social justice and the moral tidiness of the earlier work’s conclusion.
Most of this novel is devoted (relentlessly, moment by moment) to a single summer, a hiatus that might have been uneventful and dull if not for the way Harriet focuses her obsessions on it. Tartt writes so well that no phase of the novel is tedious, though some are excruciating; she holds her reader’s head beneath the surface of childhood ennui and unhappiness for a long time, and Harriet has plenty to be unhappy about.
When she was an infant, her 9-year-old brother, Robin, was found hanged in a tree in the family back yard. Though the house was full of people at the time, no explanation and no culprit have ever been found. Harriet’s older sister Allison, who might have been a witness to the crime, has since withdrawn and spends most of her time sleeping. Her mother, Charlotte, has faded into an ineffectual, ghostlike presence, while her father, Dix, has decamped to a neighboring state on some professional pretext and communicates only by monthly check. The only vital presences in Harriet’s life are her maternal grandmother, Edie Cleve; Edie’s flock of Weltyesque sisters (all of whom live nearby); and the black housekeeper, Ida Rhew.
In a prologue that describes the day of Robin’s death, Tartt takes a rather acid view of the oft-sentimentalized Southern habit of story embellishment as it plays out in Charlotte’s family:
“Even the cruelest and most random disasters . . . were constantly rehearsed among them, her grandmother’s gentle voice and her mother’s stern one merging harmoniously with her grandfather’s baritone and the babble of her aunts, and certain ornamental bits, improvised by daring soloists, eagerly seized upon and elaborated by the chorus, until finally, by group effort, they arrived together at a single song; a song which was then memorized, and sung by the entire company again and again, which slowly eroded memory and came to take the place of truth.”
Twelve years later, the application of this technique to the collective memory of Robin is similarly suspect:
“The mysterious, conflicted circumstances of Robin’s death were not subject to this alchemy. Strong as the Cleves’ revisionist instincts were, there was no plot to be imposed on these fragments, no logic to be inferred, no lesson in hindsight, no moral to this story. Robin himself, or what they remembered of him, was all they had; and their exquisite delineation of his character–painstakingly ornamented over a number of years–was their greatest masterpiece. Because he had been such an engaging little stray of a boy, and because his whims and peculiarities were precisely why they had all loved him so, in their reconstructions the impulsive quickness of the living Robin came through in places almost painfully clear and then he would practically be dashing down the street on his bicycle past you, learning forward, hair blown back, stepping hard on the pedals so the bike wobbled slightly–a fitful, capricious, breathing child. But this clarity was deceptive, lending treacherous verisimilitude to what was largely a fabular whole, for in other places the story was worn nearly transparent, radiant but oddly featureless, as the lives of saints sometimes are.”
Reared on this narrative, Harriet intuits that her brother’s death, in wrecking her family, has also destroyed the life she might otherwise have had. Her summer project becomes to fit the inexplicable horror of Robin’s murder into a plot as neatly worked out as that of “Treasure Island” or any of the other Victorian children’s classics to which she is devoted. Very much in the family tradition, she elaborates a suggestive detail imparted by Ida–that Ida chased Danny Ratliff, a lower-class white boy about Robin’s age, out of the yard a short time before the body was found–into a narrative that convicts Danny as the killer.
In the novel’s present, Danny lives on the other side of the tracks from the genteel decay of Harriet’s home, running a methamphetamine lab with his brother Farish; both of them take too much of their product. A third brother, Eugene, is a convict turned priest; a fourth, the amiable idiot Curtis, is reminiscent of Lee’s Boo Radley. As the Cleve ladies owe a good deal to Welty, the Ratliffs owe something to Flannery O’Connor, but Tartt gets all of these characters completely out of the shell of their literary antecedents; they feel as real and as tangible as anyone you know. Still, Danny and Farish inhabit a surreal world of cranked-up delusion, and as Harriet’s spying begins to interfere with their drug-running operation, they concoct a narrative about her as fantastic as the one that she has created for them.
Between the spasms of action generated by Harriet’s contacts with the Ratliffs, the novel features long doldrums when there’s no wind on the narrative sail, and nothing much happens. These passages are kept interesting by Tartt’s extraordinary vividness of characterization and the extraordinary textures she can get out of any scene, however banal (the miserable week that Harriet spends in a Baptist summer camp where she has fled from the Ratliffs is one of the best bits in the book, though it doesn’t much advance the plot). At times the reader may suspect that Tartt, like her hero, has lost track of what she’s trying to do, but in fact a certain shapelessness in the novel is probably intentional.
“The Little Friend” ends with a virtuoso action/suspense sequence that will rip you right to the edge of your seat, and yet it has no real conclusion. On the contrary, several narrative threads are conspicuously left dangling. Lack of resolution has become the point. Harriet’s arduous construction of events proves to have no better relationship to reality than Farish’s most speed-crazed conspiracy theories (to which it is wittily compared). With this deliberate inconclusiveness, Tartt departs from the morally ordered realm of Harper Lee to enter the terrain of a more recent Southern Gothic writer: Cormac McCarthy. Tartt’s world looks more civilized than McCarthy’s, at least superficially, but in the end it’s just as frightening, both to Harriet and to us: a world wholly inimical to the human desire for meaning, though decorated by “poisonous flowers” of story.
