This essay sinks into soggy self-focused sentimentalism at the end, but the beginning is grand (also does nobody remember the rules about spelling out numbers anymore? WHERE ARE THE COPYEDITORS) (on the breadlines):
A word can mean a whole book.
It’s rare but happens,
a book using a word enough and so well as to have invented the word,
even if the word was already in the dictionary, so that the word becomes
the world of the book, in yours.“Pneumatic” is ever the sex in Brave New World, “languorous” the slack line of beauty in Lolita. In The Secret History,
Donna Tartt’s first and thrilling novel, “chill” is not slang, is not
cool or alright, and is not just a temperature, either, or a thing on
the flesh, but the flesh itself—a clean subcutaneous dread.
The
prologue, a murder scene remembered, has “the first chill of the snow.”
On the 10th page are “the bright, chill mezzanines” of shopping malls
in Plano, where our narrator, Richard Papen, was raised. On page 22, at
Hampden College in New Hampshire, is “a chill distaste” on the lips of
Henry, leader of the Homer-otic scholars who’ll make our Richard’s fate.
On page 63 we see “far-off bonfires, sharp with the edge of a twilight
chill.” On page 64, a “chill and early dark.” On page 88, “those chill
afternoons when the sky was like lead and the clouds were racing” and on
page 119, “the slightest chill,” at which Richard’s bones, years later,
ache. “With a small chill,” on page 166, he remembers a clue to his
undoing he’d ignored, while on 233 the answer’s “so obvious it [gives
him] a chill” and on 238 he’s “disturbed by a chill undertow of
reality.” Furthermore: “chill sunlight” (247); “a strange mixture of
chill and warmth” (283); “the chill air” (441); “with a chill I
recognized…” (494).
To un-chill oneself from The Secret History takes a long time and still might not happen.
- "Donna Tartt's The Secret History"
descensus Averno facilis est