Love its parts, not its whole

Maggie says:
It was with huge anticipation and delight that I sunk into Donna Tartt’s second novel, The Little Friend. You may remember that Tartt’s first novel, The Secret History, is one of my all-time favorite books for the gorgeous way it strikes a balance between intellect and lyricism. Tartt’s brilliant and her writing shows it.

In The Little Friend, the makings for another great book were all there: Not set in a cold New England town this time (which I know a thing or two about), but instead set in the South, which I also know a thing or two about. Not first-person narrated by a self-conscious college guy, this time we get third-person narration featuring a spunky, smart young girl named Harriet. I can hang with spunky, smart girls. Less a tale of friends binding and then unraveling through murder, this one takes place a decade after a brother’s murder with the unsolved weight of it hanging in the air as heavy as the humidity. Sounds good. Throw in some snake-handling, some class and race conflict, some kooky Southerners, religion of all shades and stripes, and this should have been my favorite book ever.

And yet.

Something didn’t quite gel here. I remember reading a Tartt interview when The Little Friend was published where she admitted it took her ten years to finish this second novel. She felt haunted by the success of the first – written when she was only 28 – and struggled to write a book about her home that was distinctly different than the critically-acclaimed novel that spoke to her college years. To be honest, it was sometimes a struggle to finish reading it.

If only I loved this book in whole as much as I love its parts. I love the childlike precociousness of Harriet and the true-blue way her friend Hely loves her. I love the childhood summer spirit that’s so well captured in their long afternoons. I love Harriet’s grandmother and great-aunts, the way they live with a shared identity yet each very separately, each the fabric of each other’s stories, each the rock of the other. I love the small-town feel with the family everyone’s scared of, the Sunday School teacher who’s not exactly Christian in his business practices, the underbelly of the town mixed with “the Club” and its crowd. I love the tone of a death you can never overcome, the influence an absence has over a town in a way a presence never could, the shadow that never lifts. I love reading about the seediness of meth-making culture, the hysteria of drug addiction, the suffocation of family that makes you as desperate as you are loyal. But I don’t love the crime-avenging here or the adventure tale. It just doesn’t work for me.

It occurs to me that we remember parts of our childhoods and growing up in these miraculous passages of characters and details. What we forget is the everyday-ness that binds all of that together. There’s a reason we’re not all writing epic novels about the summer we were 12: it’s probably more the stuff of a novella or a short story collection. So should this have been.

But of course, I’m absolutely itching for Tartt to write number three.

And: I’m heading to the beach in two weeks, so I’m accepting any and all book recommendations for the days upon days I’ll spend doing nothing but lying in the sun, reading, and swimming.