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    Study Guide for Book Clubs: The Secret History: Study Guides for Book Clubs, #18
    Study Guide for Book Clubs: The Secret History: Study Guides for Book Clubs, #18
    Study Guide for Book Clubs: The Secret History: Study Guides for Book Clubs, #18
    Ebook127 pages2 hours

    Study Guide for Book Clubs: The Secret History: Study Guides for Book Clubs, #18

    By Kathryn Cope

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    About this ebook

    No reading group should be without this companion guide to Donna Tartt's literary thriller, The Secret History. A comprehensive guide to this contemporary classic, this discussion aid includes all the information you need to get your book club discussion up and running: useful literary context; an author biography; plot synopsis; themes & symbols; character analysis; discussion questions; recommended further reading and even a quick quiz.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherKathryn Cope
    Release dateFeb 26, 2018
    ISBN9781386338505
    Study Guide for Book Clubs: The Secret History: Study Guides for Book Clubs, #18
    Author

    Kathryn Cope

    Kathryn Cope graduated in English Literature from Manchester University and obtained her master’s degree in contemporary fiction from the University of York. She is the author of Study Guides for Book Clubs and the HarperCollins Offical Book Club Guide series. She lives in the Staffordshire Moorlands with her husband, son and dog.

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      Book preview

      Study Guide for Book Clubs - Kathryn Cope

      INTRODUCTION

      There are few things more rewarding than getting together with a group of like-minded people and discussing a good book. Book club meetings, at their best, are vibrant, passionate affairs. Each member will bring along a different perspective and ideally there will be heated debate.

      Nevertheless, a surprising number of book club members report that their meetings have been a disappointment. Even when their group enjoyed the book in question, they could think of astonishingly little to say about it and soon wandered off-topic altogether. Failing to find interesting discussion angles for a book is the single most common reason for book group meetings to fall flat. Most groups only meet once a month, and a lacklustre meeting is frustrating for everyone.

      Study Guides for Book Clubs were born out of a passion for reading groups. Packed with information, they take the hard work out of preparing for a meeting and ensure that your book group discussions never run dry. How you choose to use the guides is entirely up to you. The first few chapters provide useful background information which may be worthwhile to share with your group early on. The all-important list of discussion questions, which will probably form the core of your meeting, can be found towards the end of this guide. To support your responses to the discussion questions, you will find it helpful to refer to the Themes, and Character sections.

      A detailed plot synopsis is provided as an aide-memoire to recap on the finer points of the story. There is also a quick quiz—a fun way to test your knowledge and bring your discussion to a close. Finally, if this was a book that you enjoyed, the guide concludes with a list of further reads similar in style or subject matter.

      This guide contains spoilers. Please do not be tempted to read it before you have finished the original novel as plot surprises will be well and truly ruined.

      Kathryn Cope, 2014

      TEN REASONS TO READ THE SECRET HISTORY

      1/ It’s a cult classic.

      Published over twenty years ago, The Secret History became a sensation on its release. Cool, exciting and literary, it was viewed as a remarkable first novel, particularly as the author was only 19 when she began to write it. Following the success of Tartt’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel, The Goldfinch, many original readers have been drawn back to The Secret History second-time around. Those of us who read the novel as impressionable students ourselves can now approach it with the experience and wisdom of middle age.

      2/ It’s a thinking person’s thriller.

      Tartt successfully blends a literary style of writing with a page-turning murder story. The novel is a ‘whydunnit’ rather than a ‘whodunnit’. From the first page of the novel, the reader knows the identity of the victim and one of the murderers. This in no way lessens the suspense, as Tartt focuses on the building tensions between the characters. Their closed, intimate world becomes increasingly claustrophobic as the group struggle to maintain their terrible secret.

      3/ It gives the reader access to an elite world.

      When the narrator arrives at Hampden College, he is introduced to a privileged world of trust funds, wealthy great-aunts and languid weekends spent at country houses. He also enters an esoteric academic life, far-removed from modern, everyday experience. By reading Richard’s narrative, we can enjoy this elite world by proxy.

      4/ The picturesque New England setting.

      The action is located at the fictional college campus of Hampden in Vermont, New England. As soon as he lays eyes on Hampden, Richard falls in love with it. The novel beautifully conjures up the mist, the russet leaves and the white clapboard buildings so that, as readers, we feel that we are there.

      5/ It has the power of a Greek tragedy.

      Tartt’s clever incorporation of the structure of Greek tragedy into her novel gives the narrative added power. Just as a Greek audience knew what was going to happen from the beginning of a play, our knowledge of what Richard is going to do increases our involvement with his actions. We watch with a sense of increasing doom as Richard makes the errors of choice which will lead to his downfall.

      6/ It has an unreliable narrator.

      As a narrator, Richard is an outsider and yet has a great deal of emotional investment in the events he describes. He is also deceived by the other characters at several points in the novel. His struggle to produce a true and objective account of events gives the novel an intriguing complexity.

      7/ It immerses us in the world of ancient Greece.

      The novel’s characters are preoccupied with the world of ancient Greece - its myths, rituals, language and drama. For those of us less familiar with this world, Tartt provides a fascinating glimpse of the contradictions within this intellectual yet bloodthirsty civilization.

      8/ It is a novel that revels in cleverness.

      The Secret History draws us into an esoteric academic world where the power of the intellect is King. In doing so, Tartt also displays her own impressive academic knowledge with liberal sprinklings of classical and literary references. The novel is littered with significant epigraphs and epigrams and its characters routinely greet one another in Latin or Greek just for the fun of it. Heavy-weight intellectuals can nod sagely at the Latin interjections while the rest of us simply enjoy basking in the intellectual decadence of it all.

      9/ It has a cast of fabulously awful characters.

      A knowing reader will quickly spot that the friends with which Richard becomes so enamoured are a selfish, spoilt and amoral bunch. They may also notice sinister elements to his charming and charismatic Greek tutor. The characters are drawn in such a way, however, that we can understand Richard’s fascination while seeing the truth. Tartt’s character portrayal is particularly interesting as she herself is known to have been a member of an elite literary group of college friends not dissimilar to that described in her novel.

      10/ It is a glorious literary mash-up.

      The Secret History was described by one perceptive critic as "Dead Poets Society meets Lord of the Flies, penned by F. Scott Fitzgerald paying homage to Joseph Conrad."  When writing her first novel, Tartt was clearly heavily influenced by some of the greatest novels of all time; particularly The Great Gatsby, Lord of the Flies and Brideshead Revisited. While the result of such a mixture could have been truly awful, Tartt pulls this literary amalgamation off with style and the end result is truly her own.

      DONNA TARTT

      Born in 1963, Donna Tartt is an American writer who grew up in Missouri. A very private person, she has a reputation for being enigmatic, sparked by her dislike of the trappings of literary celebrity. She has also become something of a style icon; known for her sleek 1920s-inspired bob and immaculately cut masculine suits.

      Tartt’s writing career has proved that dislike of the limelight is not necessarily a barrier to literary success. The publication of her 1992 debut novel, The Secret History, met with international success and literary acclaim. The sophisticated psychological thriller, following the lives of a group of classics scholars who commit murder, became a cult classic.

      In all, The Secret History took nine years for Tartt to complete. She began working on it when she was only 19 and a student at Bennington College, a small liberal arts campus in Vermont. Her portrayal of student life at the fictional college of Hampden bears many similarities to Tartt’s experiences of Bennington. Firstly, her description of the picturesque campus is strikingly similar to the setting and layout of Bennington. More intriguingly still, Tartt studied classics under an eccentric tutor who was selective about his students. Her college friendship group was also not dissimilar to the elite group of classics students she portrays in her novel.

      The Secret History is dedicated to Tartt’s friend and fellow writer, Bret Easton Ellis. Most famous for his controversial novel, American Psycho, Ellis was one of an elite literary group at Bennington to which Tartt also belonged. Interestingly, Ellis also wrote a college campus-based novel, The Rules of Attraction, published in 1987. Ellis’s novel is a satire focusing on a group of spoiled and promiscuous liberal arts students at a New Hampshire college. Tartt and Ellis consulted with and supported one another while writing their novels, and both books contain witty cross-references to each other’s story lines. In The Secret History, Tartt makes passing reference to the suicide of a freshman girl: an important part of the plot in The Rules of Attraction. Similarly, Ellis’s novel mentions a group of classics students who dress like undertakers and are suspected of performing pagan rituals and slaying farmers in the countryside.

      Tartt took roughly another decade to write her following novel, The Little Friend. A coming-of-age novel set in 1970s Mississippi, it follows the story of Harriet, a 12-year-old girl determined to take revenge for the death of her brother. Due to the overwhelming success of The Secret History and the intervening gap between novels, the publication of The Little Friend was much-anticipated. Although it was shortlisted for the Orange Prize, for some reason it failed to achieve the mass popularity of The Secret History.

      A further ten years down the line, The Goldfinch was published in 2013. Tartt’s third novel is an epic coming-of-age story. Set in contemporary New York, it charts the life of Theo Decker from the age of fourteen. Theo’s life is changed forever by the death of his mother in a terrorist explosion and he is catapulted into

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