Tartted Up

At our lunch in Memphis’s Peabody Hotel, she had soup and mineral water and spoke in an engaging, friendly voice that ages into expatriated southern as the afternoon lumbers on. Her eyes glow light green–just as it says in all the profiles. She tends to close them when she’s making a particularly dear point. She says “you know” a lot. She’s unfailingly polite, witty, attentive, and would have snagged the check had I not been so quick on the draw.

There. Now we can get on with the book. To borrow a page from both of Tartt’s novels and reveal the crime straight up, “The Little Friend” is better than “The Secret History,” her debut novel, which was published when she was twenty-eight and launched a thousand rumors. Her new book comes to us ten years after her premiere, and it shows. Donna Tartt has matured.

Like her first book, “The Little Friend” revolves around the aftermath of a murder. Harriet Cleve Dufresnes is in diapers when her brother, nine-year-old Robin, is found hanging from a black tupelo tree in the family’s backyard. The crime never gets solved. Not even a suspect. Authorities eventually write it off as the grotesque work of a vagrant.

After the death of Robin, the Dufresnes family fractures. Harriet’s father takes a job in Nashville, and her mother descends into a kind of fugue. Harriet and her older sister, Allison, grow up largely under the supervision of the family maid, an indomitable grandmother, and three semi-doting aunts. When those women aren’t around, which is often, the Dufresnes girls are on their own. Especially little Harriet.

Lacking parental guidance and reared on such books as “Treasure Island” that she takes as gospel, Harriet gives free rein to her imagination. At age twelve, she becomes consumed, in a school-project sort of way, with the notion that she should solve her brother’s murder–with the minimal aid of her best friend and partner-in-crime-solving, an eleven-year-old boy named Hely. (What Harriet sees as a crusade Hely sees as a rollicking good time.) The prime suspect, in Harriet’s mind, quickly becomes a member of the “country sorry” Ratliff clan. The Ratliffs’ main preoccupation is manufacturing methamphetamine. And for much of the novel, the story unfolds through the eyes of either Harriet or the Ratliffs, who represent two distinct southern types: a prominent, old-monied, proud family in decline and a lawless, squalid, proud family going nowhere. The Compsons and the Snopeses.

BOTH “The Little Friend” and “The Secret History” are, as Tartt laughingly puts it, “about kids who read too much.” “The Secret History”–a tale of murder, cover-up, college kids, and reading–succeeded as both story and literature in daunting circumstances: It was a first novel; it was a dense, often digressive book compared with such minimalist peers as “Less Than Zero” and “Bright Lights, Big City”; and it faced the enormous task of living up to its own hype.

Donna Tartt labored for almost a decade on “The Secret History,” which finally came out to much fanfare in the fall of 1992. Tartt had begun the book as a student at Bennington College in Vermont–but the Tartt legend goes back to her freshman year at Ole Miss in Oxford, where she submitted a few stories to the school paper, which fell into the hands of faculty member and local literary god Willie Morris.

The story goes that the late author and editor of Harper’s spied Donna Tartt one evening at a Holiday Inn bar off the Oxford town square. Acting on the knowledge that this pixie-sized co-ed was indeed the young writer he’d come to admire, good ol’ Willie introduced himself with a dramatic and portentous flourish: “My name is Willie Morris, and I think you’re a genius.” Morris encouraged Tartt to leave Oxford for Bennington, where she met Bret Easton Ellis. Another bit of good fortune. Ellis would soon make a splash with “Less Than Zero,” and, when Donna Tartt finished her first novel, he shepherded it along to his New York super-agent, Amanda (Binky) Urban. The rest is pop history: The agent loved the book, set off a bidding war, and secured for Tartt a $450,000 advance and a half-million dollars for the paperback rights. Film options, foreign sales, more press than any southerner this side of a certain Arkansas governor–it all helped to create the Donna Tartt phenomenon.

Perhaps the biggest surprise was that the book lived up to its hype. “The Secret History” introduces the reader to an exclusive group of privileged classics students at a small college in Vermont. The students enact a bacchic ritual that leads first to an accidental murder and then to a murder of one of their own to cover up their tracks. The book has its problems. The second half sags, and the characters aren’t richly developed. (One could accurately describe them as bored white snobs.) But there’s no denying “The Secret History” is a page-turner with depth. It also contains one of fiction’s great opening lines: “The snow in the mountains was melting and Bunny had been dead for several weeks before we came to understand the gravity of our situation.” More than all that, the book seemed a harbinger of great things to come from its young author.

BUT THEN came the decade-long wait for her second novel. Marc Smirnoff, editor of the Oxford American, notes that Donna Tartt has hardly been inactive, publishing fiction and nonfiction in Harper’s, the New Yorker, GQ, and in his own magazine. “What’s mesmerizing about them, besides their subtlety and eloquence,” he says, “has been their variety and reach. Such quality is harder to pull off than cranking out mediocre books. I say we’re better off with fewer books but better ones.”

“The Little Friend” is set in the fictional town of Alexandria, Mississippi, a creation of Tartt’s built from parts of Oxford, Greenwood, and perhaps her hometown of Grenada. “The town itself can be a character,” she told me. “It can be an engine powering the story.” Alexandria is filled with the kind of characters that anyone who’s lived in the South will recognize: the Ratliffs; Gum, the Ratliffs’ grandmother and perpetually dying freak of nature; the Cleve sisters, a group of strong women who make up the matriarchal society that dominates the story; the spooky, snake-handling preacher; the smarmy car salesman; the underpaid, under-appreciated, under-educated black maid who’s the real mother to the privileged white children under her care.

If such characters seem somewhat stock, they’re also accurate. Mississippi in the 1970s was actually like this. And then there’s the irresistible Harriet. If she’s not an original figure in American literature, she’s still great fun. “Harriet is very narrowly focused,” Donna Tartt says. “She’s very obsessive. She thinks that putting these nineteenth-century templates of honor on her own life, this is how to solve it. This is how to make things right. It’s like a novel. It’s like a story for her. And she doesn’t understand yet that life is not a story.”

READERS WILL DETECT in Harriet a bit of Scout Finch from “To Kill a Mockingbird,” and maybe a bit of Mattie Ross from Charles Portis’s “True Grit,” especially in her independence and single-mindedness to see justice done. When I mention this to Tartt, she doesn’t cringe exactly but answers, “Scout is a real sweet, innocent child. She doesn’t really have a personality like Harriet at all. Scout is not going to try to kill someone. Do you know what I’m saying? Mattie Ross. . . . I loved her. If you ask me, Charles Portis is the greatest living, unsung American writer.”

Even if Harriet is part Scout, part Mattie Ross, and part Donna Tartt, she’s memorable enough to haunt your dreams. Which is one reason “The Little Friend” does, too. Little Harriet is a girl we all would have fallen for at eleven–just as her friend Hely has:

There were plenty of girls at school prettier than Harriet, and nicer. But none of them were as smart, or as brave. Sadly, he thought of her many gifts. She could forge handwriting–teacher handwriting–and compose adult-sounding excuse notes like a pro; she could make bombs from vinegar and baking soda, mimic voices over the telephone. She loved to shoot fireworks–unlike a lot of girls, who wouldn’t go near a string of firecrackers. She got sent home in second grade for tricking a boy into eating a spoonful of cayenne pepper; and two years ago she had started a panic by saying that the spooky old lunchroom in the school basement was a portal to Hell.

“The Little Friend” is a murder mystery, a coming-of-age novel, and a period piece, all wrapped together–which makes it sound, on its face, as though it were just another southern novel with all the usual themes. Despite the media’s fascination with a “New South,” we don’t really do new in the South. So the writer who accepts the challenge of setting a story in Mississippi faces the near impossible task of telling an old story in a different and interesting way.

It takes a rare talent to pull off that trick, but Donna Tartt manages. She tells a good story, she crafts a fine sentence, she develops her characters, and, more than all that, she has that ability to turn her readers into addicts. A typical Tartt junkie will have a reaction similar to the one I got from a colleague, who said of “The Little Friend” that “it makes me wish she had, like, five more books.” Donna Tartt’s image, her pretension, the mysterious gap between novels, the whole ball of publicity wax, just provides the addicts another hit. My experience interviewing Tartt forced me to the uncomfortable admission that an author can be pretentious and still substantive and talented. Even worse, that she may not be as pretentious as her carefully crafted image would have you believe. After an afternoon with Tartt, I worried that I was at risk of losing a most cherished prejudice.

When we finished the formal interview-lunch, we headed out for a second, more casual round at a popular bookstore in Memphis called Burke’s. Donna Tartt sat alone in the backseat while her publicist drove down Poplar Avenue and I rode shotgun–with Led Zeppelin screeching and groaning its way through a cut from the album “Physical Graffiti.” “Ratliff music,” says the publicist, Paul Bogaards (laid back, friendly, and inconspicuous enough to give New York literary types a good name). Bogaards thought it’d be fun to listen to some Ratliff music as he and the author made the trip up from Oxford to Memphis.

SO we’re all unintentionally bobbing our heads, 1970s burnout style, as we tool along in suits and ties, when Donna Tartt leans up on the front seat and points out a record store called Pop Tunes, where, legend has it, Elvis used to shop. “That’s where I bought my first Sex Pistols record,” she says, detouring the conversation to punk rock. And suddenly Donna Tartt is the girl you knew in college. She talks about how disappointed she was in the movie “Sid and Nancy,” about the Sex Pistols’ drug-addled guitarist and his girlfriend. Courtney Love would have made a much better Nancy, she says. Then she remembers, in a kind of eureka moment, that one of her favorite books as a teenager was “And I Don’t Want to Live This Life” by Nancy’s mom, Deborah Spungen.

“I bought it at the Piggly Wiggly,” she says proudly. She’s like this all the way to the bookstore–and I could suddenly see that she must have been just like Harriet as a child. Charming and funny and smart and brave. The kind of girl who could compose adult-sounding excuse notes and make bombs from vinegar and baking soda and mimic voices over the telephone. The kind of girl who could trick us all into eating a spoonful of cayenne pepper.

Kane Webb is assistant editorial-page editor at the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.