The Little Friend

** SPOILERS **

unlike the secret history and the goldfinch, this one does not have such a satisfying ending - it's open, leaving more questions than answers, lifetimes of uncertainty stretching ahead. but because of that, it's more *real* than her other two books. yes, the misunderstandings are the stuff of fairytales, but it's all so grounded that i never got swept away into fantasy. tartt's child characters are so convincingly young and fully articulated, in a way that no other writer quite manages, i think. and of course, this story is set in the world she grew up in, which makes it all the richer. her writing is gripping as always, but more propulsive and accessible here, i felt. i can see why people like it less than her other two show more books, because it's less pretentious. but to me that just makes it different. she's a master. that's all there is to say. show less

This is an absolutely fabulous read which beams the reader to a hot 1970s summer in Mississippi and the dysfunctional Cleve family. After the murder- unsolved - of their young son, twelve years earlier, the parents have drifted apart. Father lives and works away; mother is absent, distracted - the care of her remaining two daughters falling mainly to the home help, Ida, and her own mother and aunts..elderly, formerly well-to-do southerners. Elder daughter Allison still seems traumatized by the past; and the younger child, Harriet, is on the cusp of adolescence, intelligent, challenging...and determined to spend her holidays finding her brother's killer...
This is emphatically not to be read as a murder mystery- although expect some show more thrilling moments. Tartt does an amazing job at evoking the world of the child becoming an adult. And this is far from a world of gentility, magnolias and mansions, as the seamy side of Mississippi life figures large too, with the criminal Ratliff brothers and their cohorts; meth manufacture, mental illness, snake-handling clergymen...
Other reviewers have commented on the novel's failure to tie up the loose ends and definitively answer the important question....but I don't think that makes it a failure as a story. Harriet is the protagonist; she acts, she sets events in motion, and in life there are not always clear cut answers.
I don't think the cover does this book any favours- featuring a grotesque doll, the reader might imagine a Chucky type horror tale, whereas this is a highly literary, descriptive and classy work.
One you'll never forget. show less

Apparently when planning out this novel Donna Tartt said to herself, "I'm gonna characterize the FUCK out of these people", and so for over 550 pages of the hardcover edition, she did. Imagine a classical music composer largely eschewing melody in the creating of a lengthy symphony, though obligatory nods in that direction are included, but creating a work with astounding orchestral colorization. So it is here with Tartt, plot, and characterization. It will frustrate and annoy many. It did me when I didn't feel quite in the mood for it in these few weeks it took me to go through it, when I was thinking that a melody with a nice hook sure sounded appealing. Having finished it now and with the whole piece in mind, I'm left thinking how show more impressive the achievement is, and what a great talent Tartt has. show less

Nearly every critique of this book is spot on. The plot is thin at best, the end is bizarre and unsatisfying, the depiction of class and poverty is sometimes offensively shallow. Characters and subplots are introduced and then almost immediately dropped. It's like reading just the bits that get cut from an abridged version of a Victor Hugo novel.
However! I really liked it.
I think everyone basically agrees that Donna Tartt does good prose, but I think it's stronger here than in her other novels; the third person serves it well, keeps it a little more grounded than the usual ultra-introspective sad boy thing.
In that respect it resembles more closely her short fiction, both in style and content. In fact I think this one reads (and is show more probably best read—to save it from the meandering dissatisfaction it is as a novel) more like a collection of interrelated stories than as a single novel. You know, not that I'm partial to that form or anything.
The real strength here, though, is the character work. Oh Harriet! What a sad and delightful character. Of course I relate to the weird little girl antics, which are by turns hilarious and horrifying; I'm always surprised how rare girls and women like Harriet are in fiction, given how visible they are in real life (and given how many of them are writers). But it's to Tartt's credit that Harriet feels so much like a whole person, and the later parts of the book, where Harriet is not just a funny precocious unpleasant little girl, where she is overwhelmed and out of her element and her family's real negligence becomes clear, were genuinely moving to me. Which, you know, doesn't usually happen for me.
Anyways. Woof. Writing positive reviews is hard. show less

Six-word review: Wish I'd known plot wouldn't resolve.

Extended review:

Brilliant prose, exceptional characters, vivid setting, gripping scenes, complex plot: how can a story have so many virtues and yet leave me feeling so ill-served?

I invested many hours in reading this 555-page novel, and it wasn't until I actually reached the last page that it dawned on me that the author was going to leave me in ignorance: not just about the plot's driving question but about thread after thread of subplot and secondary character.

That's not what I expected after reading the author's other two novels, and it's not what I expected from the implicit promises of this one.

It may be that that's life; but that's not a satisfying novel.

I'm not going to cite show more passages or quote noteworthy excerpts or praise the themes and motifs and figurative language, although I might have. Instead I'm just going to walk away; but I am going to call back over my shoulder and say, "And besides, you don't know how to conjugate 'lay.'" show less

If it hadn't been for the pandemic, I may not have got round to reading 'The Little Friend'. Much as I adored [b:The Goldfinch|17333223|The Goldfinch|Donna Tartt|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1378710146l/17333223._SY75_.jpg|24065147], a synopsis of 'The Little Friend' did not really appeal and a friend had accidentally spoiled me for the ending. However, I need involving and ideally long fiction right now and thus decided to trust Donna Tartt. I am torn about giving this novel three rather than four stars, as I appreciated how distractingly immersive it was. That said, I liked it significantly less than [b:The Secret History|29044|The Secret History|Donna show more Tartt|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1451554846l/29044._SY75_.jpg|221359] and especially [b:The Goldfinch|17333223|The Goldfinch|Donna Tartt|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1378710146l/17333223._SY75_.jpg|24065147]. The great appeal is Tartt's writing, which has a fascinatingly rich quality to it, and characterisation. The weakness is the plot. It took about three hundred pages for anything of note to happen, then the ending after seven hundred pages seems remarkably abrupt and lacking in catharsis. Indeed, I'm glad of the spoiler that gave me realistic expectations. I knew that neither Harriet nor the reader would ever find out who murdered Robin. I did not realise the story would end with Harriet still ill in hospital and at risk from a miraculously survived Danny Ratliff, having realised he probably didn't kill her brother. What happened to Harriet next? Guess I'll have to make that up myself.

The setting is 1970s Mississippi, in a family still struggling with the tragic murder of a child more than a decade before. The narrative centres upon twelve year old Harriet, a very vivid and well-developed character. She is smart and independent, while still being recognisably childish in her assumptions and obsessions. Her older sister and mother are distant, so she spends much of her time with her friend Hely and the black housekeeper Ida. Tartt is excellent at evoking the atmosphere and mores of the time, including pervasive racism and classism. The dynamics of Harriet's all-female family (sister, mother, grandmother, and three great aunts) are explored at great length, with an acutely observant eye. The bickering between elderly sisters is so perfectly convincing that it made me grit my teeth. The whole family gives the impression of being stuck, trapped by the past and ingrained habits, unable to look beyond long-established perceptions of each other. Harriet finds this understandably frustrating; her older sister resists it in a passive fashion. More than anything, this is a book about trauma and the havoc it wreaks on families. Not the most cheerful topic, but one that Tartt certainly does considerable justice to.

As Harriet embarks upon a quest for revenge, her life intersects with that of the Ratliff family. Their depiction reminded me a lot of Justified, the TV show, and the [a:Elmore Leonard|12940|Elmore Leonard|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1240015224p2/12940.jpg] stories on which it was based. The setting is very similar (to my non-American eye), as is the chaos of disorganised crime committed by families trapped in poverty and addicted to the meth they cook. I'm pretty sure Justified briefly featured an evangelical preacher who handled snakes. Much of the middle third of 'The Little Friend' involves snakes, both wild and captured for religious purposes. The snakes are almost uniformly threatening and dreadful. Indeed, this book is enough to put you off them entirely. While much of the narrative is meandering and gradual, periodically it explodes into extremely tense and shockingly violent scenes. Despite (or because of) the painstaking set up, these sequences feel nightmarish as they feature so many fundamentals of bad dreams: being chased, being trapped, deadly snakes, drowning, falling, etc. You could almost describe this as a horror novel; it certainly seemed Southern gothic to me.

While memorable and utterly compelling to read, however, such frightening scenes didn't entirely add up to a coherent plot. As the reader's perspective is largely with Harriet, perhaps this was a commentary on the disorientating incomprehensibility of childhood. Harriet's visceral resentment about her life was convincing and made me sympathetic, despite the inclusion of other characters who've definitely been through worse. The novel definitely works as a character portrait of her, right up until it ends so arbitrarily. It's more depressing than [b:The Goldfinch|17333223|The Goldfinch|Donna Tartt|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1378710146l/17333223._SY75_.jpg|24065147], which ends on a fairly hopeful note. By contrast, Harriet, her family, and the rest of the characters appear doomed. Donna Tartt's writing is amazing at carrying the reader away to another world. In this case, it wasn't one I greatly enjoyed visiting, although at least it took me away from the pandemic for a solid chunk of time. show less

The blurb for this book makes it sound like a murder mystery, but it's far from that. Instead, it's a study of a family pulled apart by the death - and it seems, murder - of a bright and energetic son, Robin, at 9 years old, which occurs at the very start of the book. After that, we pick up the story 12 years later with his youngest sister, Harriet, who is the main character.

I loved Harriet although I found her very reminiscent of the protagonist in the children's book, Harriet the Spy by Louise Fitzhugh, and there are parallels between the two, for example, the way she is reared by the housekeeper and devastated when the latter leaves. However, this is a more developed character, and she doesn't spy on people out of sheer nosiness. show more Instead, this Harriet forms an obsession with who killed Robin, and embarks on a singleminded quest to dish out retribution to the person concerned. The finger is pointed by the housekeeper, Ida, whom Harriet loves and uncritically believes, and she sets out to 'get' Danny Ratliff, who already has a criminal record at the age of 20 and who was in Robin's class at school. The Ratliff family are a crime wave in themselves, and Ida holds a grudge from when they burned down a church, killing an old lady and causing her and others to suffer burns.

The book is a rather rambling tale: it consists of over 500 pages of small print. Much of it is beautifully written and observed, with believable everyday life in a small town, the interactions of family and how people often get on each others' nerves, and lots of minor quirky characters. Contrasts are made between Harriet's own more privileged family, though they have fallen from their former grandeur, and the black women who work in their houses for low pay, and the 'white trash' Ratliffs, who live in an American Gothic setting which borders on the surreal. Danny Ratliff and his brothers live in trailers with their decrepit grandmother who trades on her various illnesses, and passes on her own pernicious views of how poor people like themselves are victimised, while disdaining the education that might help her grandsons escape their deadend existence. Her favourite, Danny's elder brother, is a psychotic who has taken on these attitudes as well as inheriting their deceased father's violent streak. These tendencies are worsened by his liberal sampling of the metamphetamine he manufactures. Danny also is hooked and becomes increasingly strung out, partly through his inability to sleep due to the drug.

The Ratliffs' sense of persecution spirals as Harriet and her friend Hely become interested in what they are doing in the upstairs apartment which another of the brothers, who 'got' religion in jail, is renting. A guest preacher from out of town is staying: part of his ministry involves snakehandling, and he brings several boxes of snakes, which must be hidden from the landlord. The set piece where the two children break into the apartment is a tour de force. In fact, snakes figure largely in this story: I had no idea before that there were so many poisonous kinds in the USA. Unfortunately for Harriet, the brothers search for her afterwards, and she is drawn increasingly into danger. This suspenseful subplot contrasts with the languid life of Harriet's mother Charlotte - who has never recovered from Robin's death and spends most of the time lying around in bed, spaced out on tranquilisers - and her older sister Allison who lives a kind of dream existence. Harriet takes after her no-nonsense grandmother Edie, another character I liked, and finds it impossible to confide in her family. She only has Hely to turn to and when he is drawn away into school activities, he inadvertantly abandons her to the mercies of the Ratliff family.

A lot of the book is in the style of 'slice of life', giving the flavour of life in a southern American town in what appears to be the 1970s from the various clues and references made. A lot of things are brought in and appear to be significant, but are then dropped - Robin's blackbird costume, a hat once found by an aunt on her bed when no one apparently could have entered the house, Allison's amnesia about what happened to Robin although she was out in the garden and was found crying, so it seems she was a witness. This would probably frustrate a lot of readers, but I found I could go with the flow - this isn't really a crime story despite the criminals, and the crime - if it was that and not a freak accident which happened to a little boy who liked playing Batman - is significant more for the way it has wrenched family life out of a precarious normality, and the impact it has had on the forming of Harriet's character. Only the very ending caught me out a bit when it veered off to a conversation between Hely and his older brother, but I think it is meant to point us to who 'dunnit'. The scene just before it, where Harriet's father mentions 'Robin's little friend, Danny' (presumably Danny is the 'little friend' of the title, which explains why so much of the book focuses on his viewpoint), leading to Harriet's horrified realisation that she might have been wrong all along, might also act as a reminder, when we read the final scene, that Hely's brother was also in Robin's class and therefore could have been a visitor to the house. .

Ultimately the book is realistic enough that we never find out for sure who was responsible and whether it was murder or a childhood game gone wrong - as so often in real life. The book almost earned a 5-star rating, but is more of a 4.5 because there are a lot of bits which weren't really necessary even to the 'slice of life' aspect, and the Ratliff circus becomes a little too surreal to be believed at times. show less