The Little Friend

by Donna Tartt

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Goldfinch comes an utterly riveting novel set in Mississippi of childhood, innocence, and evil. •  “Destined to become a special kind of classic.” —The New York Times Book Review

The setting is Alexandria, Mississippi, where one Mother’s Day a little boy named Robin Cleve Dufresnes was found hanging from a tree in his parents’ yard. Twelve years later Robin’s murder is still unsolved and his family remains devastated. So it is that Robin’s sister Harriet—unnervingly bright, insufferably determined, and unduly influenced by the fiction of Kipling and Robert Louis Stevenson--sets out to unmask his killer. Aided only by her worshipful friend Hely, Harriet crosses her town’s rigid lines of race and caste and burrows deep into her family’s history of loss. Filled with hairpin turns of plot and “a bustling, ridiculous humanity worthy of Dickens” (The New York Times Book Review), The Little Friend is a work of myriad enchantments by a writer of prodigious talent.

• ISBN10: 1400031699
• ISBN13: 9781400031696
• Publish Date: 28 October 2003 (first published 22 October 2002)
• Publish Status: Active
• Publish Country: US
• Publisher: Random House USA Inc
• Imprint: Vintage Books
• Format: Paperback (US Trade)
• Pages: 640
• Language: English
• URL: https://penguinrandomhouse.com/books/isbn/9781400031696

Reviews

[roundtableknight]

Rating: 3.5 stars
~
I've learned through reading all of Donna Tartt's writing that she does something interesting: her books leave the reader with an ambiguous ending. It's quite genius really, because this makes the readers ruminate over her specific word choice and character actions throughout the story. The Little Friend leans on this heavily. And though I love the mystic surrounding her obscure endings, this book I felt was presumptuous on that front; instead of giving the readers at least a crumb of satisfaction of the main plot point, what is left instead is a sense of broken, disjointed parts of a story that don't work well. The story itself is beautifully written, though banal at times, but I do wish that that I hadn't been left feeling as though I missed something in the story that wasn't their to begin with.

[clementine]

First of all, if you are considering picking this book up based on the blurb on the back, be aware that it is such a bait and switch. The blurb makes it sound like literary Gillian Flynn: a dark southern murder mystery with more than a dash of familial dysfunction. But, no, it is not about who killed Robin Cleve Dufresnes, so don't expect to get any closure in that regard. Rather, it is about his now twelve-year-old sister Harriet's dogged and kind of crazy plan to get revenge on the man who she thinks killed Robin.

Now, I did like the book despite it not being about what I thought it was going to be about. It was incredibly dark and immersive, two qualities which I love in a novel. The entire sprawling plot, all the richly-drawn characters, the intertwining stories - I enjoyed these things. And while the length of The Goldfinch didn't bother me, personally, I felt that here a bit more. I was all for it until about page 500, at which point I was like, "SURELY some of these lush descriptions could be sacrificed." Sometimes it's just a bit wandering. And I can stomach that, to a certain extent - I never felt like I was slogging through it. But I was much more aware of specific passages where I was like, "Okay, realistically, we don't need this." Like, I enjoyed a lot of these passages. Donna Tartt can write, that's for sure, and it's a pleasure to read paragraphs that are about nothing. But, well, they're still about nothing. And when your book is 624 pages long, maybe we could use slightly fewer paragraphs about nothing.

This novel is really two things at once. There's the main plot, which, let's be honest, advances rather slowly sometimes. And there's also the portrait of a dysfunctional but loving family that was once much more well-to-do than it is now. (And, I supposed, the portrait of the very dysfunctional family that has never been well-to-do and is in fact made up of meth-addicted hillbillies.) I liked both parts. But if you want a novel that cuts to the chase and just tells a damn good story, this is not the one. There is so much of it that is deeply human, detailed in a highly unusual - and, to me, enjoyable - way, but which has absolutely nothing to do with the driving force - Harriet's plan to get back at Danny Ratliff. All the stuff with summer camp, the aunts' trip, Ida? None of that is strictly necessary to tell that story. But this novel is not just that story. I think if you resign yourself to that fact, it is a much more enjoyable read. If you just want the main plot, well, you're asking it to be a book that it is not and never set out to be.