The Secret History

The Secret History is this month's book for my Book Club. I started out not liking it. I was turned off by the Classics banter initially and fearful that this was going to be a battle of academics and it also made me a little weary of our new book club member who picked this book and stated it was one of her favorites ever! I paged through the Classics banter. It was all familiar to me, I did my requisite college courses studying Greek Mythology, Greek Archaeology and Classical Literature. But I despised the discussion aspects of those classes.

But fairly quickly the book morphed into a kind of prep school kids gone bad tale that was reminiscent of books and movies like The Chocolate War, The Dead Poets Society and Good Will Hunting. That annoyed me a little because I felt like I have read this all before. YET, at the same time, I was enjoying the book and it took me back to late high school when I read The Chocolate War.

The writing and story style from the narrator's eyes was strangely reminiscent to me of one of my least favorite books ever, The Catcher in the Rye. I know, I know, everyone LOVES that book. But I didn't read it until I was 27 or so. By that point I think I had bypassed the period of time where it makes such a profound impact. By that point I was used to seeing the "f" word in written literature. I was beyond that feeling of lost and trying to identify with something. It seemed hollow to me.

In my mind now, after reading The Secret History I think of it as Holden goes to college. Richard should have been named Holden and should have hailed from the Northeast and it all would have fit for me.

The book to me was Gaussian shaped. With the y-axis being my level of enjoyment plotted as a function of page number on the x-axis. Enjoyment was low, but increased. At chapter 2 (there are only 2 freakin' chapters to this book... pet peeve!) my enjoyment was peaking and I cruised through the next 200 pages. Then it started dropping off. At the end I put it down with great disappointment. I thought the end was a cop out. She had no other way to end it and all uniqueness was abandoned.

So given this Gaussian distribution, I rate it a C. If you like college stories about prep school kids gone bad. With the protagonist being an underling who struggled to get to where he is? You will probably love it. Intrigue, mystery, characters whose personalities were carefully chosen to fill out the social styles spectrum. (Thanks V for throwing that one at me this afternoon, a new aspect!) It is all in The Secret History.

For now, I am signing off to go get the Leifer. I reserve my right to augment this post in the future pending discussion tonight!