The Little Friend, by Donna Tartt. Alfred A. Knopf. 480 pages. $26.
As a Southerner born and bred, I know of nothing more infuriating than writers who write about the South and get it wrong. The converse is also true: There is nothing more wonderful than a writer who gets it right, one who can describe the history-laden weirdness and genteel grace that coexist so improbably and so easily in every Southern town.
In her long-awaited new novel, The Little Friend, Donna Tartt gets the South exactly right -- and everything else, too. There is not a single false note anywhere in this story of a Southern family suffering the consequences of a child's mysterious murder.
Tartt's breathtaking first novel published a decade ago, The Secret History, was set in New England, no mean feat for a native of Mississippi (albeit one who attended Bennington). For her second novel, she has come home. The Little Friend takes place in Alexandria, Miss., the home of 12-year-old Harriet Cleve Dufresnes and her family.
What a family it is: her dreamy, fragile sister, Allison; her mother, Charlotte; the housekeeper Ida Rhew; her grandmother, Edie, and three great-aunts, Libby, Tat and Adelaide. Each in her own distinct way has been indelibly marked by the murder of Harriet's 9-year-old brother, Robin. More than a decade ago, he was found hanged in a tupelo tree in the yard on Mother's Day.
In a family where talking never stops, Robin's death is never discussed -- and as the book opens, 12-year-old Harriet has decided to find and kill Robin's murderer.
Tartt's artistry is flawless, and her portrait of a Southern town comes to life as Harriet pursues the man she thinks is guilty. Like Scout in Harper Lee's To Kill A Mockingbird, Harriet is forever changed by what she encounters, although the full implications of it are not always clear to her. Tartt's skillful narration allows the reader to understand Harriet, while simultaneously understanding much that Harriet does not.
This book is discerning and nuanced. It's also wildly, gloriously funny despite its serious themes -- just as life so often is. Consider this description of a local landlord and his tenants: "After cutting the upstairs and downstairs into two different apartments, and chopping down the pecan trees and rosebushes (for trees and shrubberies meant maintenance dollars), he rented the first floor almost immediately to a couple of Mormon missionary boys. That was nearly ten years ago, and still the Mormons had it -- this despite their mission's stark failure in all that time to convert even one citizen of Alexandria to their wife-swapping Utah Jesus."
Such perfect pitch makes The Little Friend as good -- maybe better -- than Tartt's first book. Hers is dense and compelling prose -- I read the whole book in a single day because I couldn't stop. Tartt has captured exactly the layered, mannered, contradictory, complicated, seething, well-bred mess that is the South. Moreover, she has shaped it into the best coming-of-age novel since To Kill A Mockingbird was published more than 40 years ago.
Dail Willis, a former reporter and editor at The Sun, is a financial writer. Her reviews have been published by the Associated Press, the Chicago Sun-Times and other newspapers. She lives in Albemarle County, Va., where historical weirdness and genteel grace are taken for granted.