Review: The Little Friend

The Little Friend by Donna Tartt
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I am as big a fan of The Secret History and The Goldfinch as anyone. I think each is a modern masterpiece, and I think Donna Tartt is one of our most gifted contemporary writers on the strength of the two of them. But this one, released a decade after the one and before the other, lacks the dark urgency of The Secret History and the vast canvas of The Goldfinch. It has a powerful kernel at the heart of it, but it’s too small a story to carry the weight of its 600+ pages.

The idea at the heart of this sounds impressive. A little girl, Harriet, comes to understand the inexplicable murder of her brother years before as having been perpetrated by a down-on-their-luck family of drug dealers and dubious evangelicals. With her precocious intelligence, she tracks down what she thinks is the real evil without understanding that evil is ultimately beyond comprehension. It’s a coming-of-age narrative with a twist – a twist of a knife where we can never see the hand behind it.

But there are all sorts of small matters that detract from that powerful central notion. For one, Tartt introduces a number of characters who, in the end, don’t contribute all that much to the story. We don’t need to see so much about Harriet’s sister or about the inner lives of her many aunts. The characters are likable enough, but they blend together somewhat, and they ultimately distract from what seems the central point about exploring the possibility of evil as a child. A little of such characters would have accomplished as much as the couple hundred pages we get of them.

For another, Tartt jumps from perspective to perspective. At times that has the virtue of placing Harriet’s questioning in a different light, letting us see through her eyes as a thoughtful detective and then see her through others as a little girl trying to find her way. At other times, it gets clumsy. [SEMI-SPOILER] In the scene where Danny and Harriet confront each other at the water tower, the action gets slowed as we switch from one pair of eyes to another. Sometimes, to my annoyance, it gets repeated.

There are parts here that venture into noir territory – what else can you call a novel that opens with the awful murder of a 13-year-old boy – but Tartt eventually shows (SPOILER: through the contrived way that Harriet survives the showdown with Danny) she doesn’t have the stomach for that. She blinks, and we get instead something that returns to the safety of conventional narrative.

Overall, I’m afraid I found myself checking how much I had left simply too often for the book to feel like a complete success. Tartt writes excellent sentences, and sometimes I’d linger over a particularly strong line, but the narrative just kept slowing down. I’d be curious to see the “studio-cut” of this, the roughly half-as-long book that would tell the same story with the excess cut out.

At the same time, I know what Tartt did before this and after, so I think the smart play remains to leave her to her own devices. This won a lot of awards when it came out 15 years ago, so maybe it’s just aged badly. In any case, with Tartt seeming to take a decade between books, I continue to look forward to the next one she rolls out, presumably in five more years.


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