The Secret History
I read The Secrect History because, over a period of several years, the YouTube algorithm kept asking me to watch an old Charlie Rose interview that a young Tartt had done to promote her book. I'd watched some of the interview when it first reared its grainy thumbnail back in the summer of ‘17, but as I hadn’t returned to the act of regular reading at that time there was no “to-read” list to add Tartt’s book to.
Then the recommendation showed up again, years later. I duly ignored it, scrolling past in search of forgotten comedy sets or a how-to video on an obscure piece of video game development software.
But the algorithm persisted. A third time, again ignored, then a few months ago a fourth, prompting me to think that the universe was trying to tell me something. Whether it was or wasn’t is a debate for another post, but this fourth showing did the trick. I’d been plowing through Tolstoy’s War and Peace and Dumas’s Count of Monte Cristo, but as with all Herculean tasks I’d grown weary of turning those pages. So, as the Charlie Rose interview once more floated past in my shameful—and let’s be real here: sitting around sucking back hours of random videos on YouTube is 100% intellectually shameful, if not downright depressing; for God’s sake, I should be doing anything but, those hours were never coming back—endless scrolling, I jumped in my Mini Cooper, drove up to the university, dodged the last remaining Palestinian solidarity encampment (RIP, a summer well-spent) and snagged a pristine copy of The Secret History right off the library’s stacks.
It was a good read: authentic down-home, crunchy, honest-to-goodness all-American modern literature. Tartt is someone who started a writing career at the tender age of five and was published by thirteen. A legit prodigy with a tendency to wax poetic, her prose gleams with fantastic descriptions of weather and emotion. There is a ton of beauty in The Secret History and it rewards the diligent reader.
It took Tartt a decade to write this book, as it’s been with all her novels. I hear that The Goldfinch is stellar, and so I’ve duly added it to the now-towering “to-read” list. Though I’m not as hard-pressed for literature, and I’ve since quit letting YouTube dominate my free—and expensive—time, I doubt I’ll get to it any time soon. Still, for all the evil that Google’s post-modern equivalent of the ol’ idiot box has inflicted on me, I’m grateful that the ghost in that terrible machine felt it important that I consume The Secret History.
2024.07.25 – 2024.09.01