The Little Friend

Rating:
Summary: Treasure Island Meets True Grit
Review: If you liked Mattie in True Grit and Jim Hawkins of Treasure Island, you'll like Harriet Cleve Dufresnes, twelve years old, of Alexandria, Mississippi. Steeped in Stevenson and the journals of Captain Scott's doomed Antarctic expedition, she takes on a family of tweaking, redneck habitual criminals, who prove remarkably hard to kill. Harriet, on the strength of a comment from her family's black housekeeper who dislikes all poor whites on principle, decides that Danny Ratliffe, twenty-four and recently released from prison, is her older brother's murderer and vows to be revenged. With the help of her best friend, Hely, she stalks the young ex-con, in between visits with her upper caste grandmother and great aunts, and epic bouts of moping. What makes this book so enjoyable is the magical way Miz Tartt enters the states of mind of Harriet, Hely, and Danny Ratliffe. They are true to life because their weaknesses are the products of their strengths. Danny, as scary and evil as he is, shares some of the charisma of Long John Silver and Harriet's intelligence and grit make her a true heroine, one to remember always. The climactic scene at the water tower is reminiscent of the "Israel Hand" colorplate in the "Treasure Island" edition illustrated by N. C. Wyeth (which the author tacitly acknowledges) and like that book, I would give a lot for the pleasure of reading this one again for the first time. Never have I wished more strongly for a sequel.

Rating:
Summary: Her Little Friends Are Evidently the Critics
Review: Imagine "To Kill a Mockingbird".
Now, take away Atticus.
Then, take away a social conscience.
Finally, remove any sort of satisfying conclusion to the story.
Add 100 or so pages of very dense narrative about very vague characters.
Stir in lots of critical hype.
You've got "The Little Friend."
There are a few bright spots. Harriet, like Scout, is an engaging character. The snake hunt has some suspense. The Sunday school and Bible camp passages are fun, as well. However, most of the story seems as unfocused and annoying as Harriet's sister and mother.

Rating:
Summary: Tartt Southern Cuisine
Review: I, like everyone else, waited 10 years for this book and while doing so I reread The Secret History several times. Was reading The Little Friend like the experience of reading The Secret History all over again? No, nor could it be. What could be that? But was it a worthwhile use of time and money? Aboslutely it was. I did not like the story as much as The Secret History nor did I think that the writing had the flow of the first novel. Only one passage did I find particularly wonderful--when she compared the serpents in Kipling's works to kings in the Old Testament. (What is it with her and snakes by the way?) But apart from that, once again Donna Tartt took me to a an unfamiliar world and made it seem that I knew the people who populated it. The characters were rich and varied, naive and sophisticated, educated and ignorant often at the same time. Tartt gives insight into the characters by placing them in situations and circumstances which are beyond their control but which they have brought about themselves and then she lets the characters act and react to each other. Once again she lets us know that incomplete knowledge (of the past or present) is a dangerous thing when we use it to go about changing the lives of others and even our own. Once again she makes us realize that no matter how hard we try, we cannot change the past and how it has affected us and the people around us. Once again she lets us know that when we try to do that, our futures will be forever altered and makes us ask ourselves if that risk is worth what we are doing with our present. If you want some food for thought served up southern style, then you may find it on the menu by reading The Little Friend.

Rating:
Summary: Needs A Good Editor
Review: Donna Tartt returns after a 10-year absence from publishing with The Little Friend. Based on the performance of the Secret History and their expectations for The Little Friend, Knopf cut Tartt a wide path of artistic freedom, but what the book needed was a good edit to tighten up the story. Just because she can tell a story at such great length doesn't mean she should.

The Little Friend contains Tartt's same gift for rich detail and narrative. But there are too many characters and too many side trips, events, and descriptions that don't move the story along. At 175 pages, I closed the cover on The Little Friend, and it makes me somewhat sad because I like Harriet. I really, really like her. She's a plucky kid on a righteous mission: discovering who killed her brother Robin when he was the same age she is now. But the book needed a much tighter focus on Harriet, her chosen task, and how she goes about accomplishing it. I simply could not keep up with all those southern women and whose progeny was connected to who and how.

I was disappointed that The Little Friend didn't grip me as The Secret History did. Perhaps the focus narrows as the story progresses, but after almost 200 pages, I was anxious to get down to the brass tacks of Harriet's mission. Here's hoping that the editor of Tartt's next book reins her in a bit.

And by the way: could Knopf have come up with an uglier cover for this book? One word for that antique doll face: yikes!

Rating:
Summary: Where oh where has our little Tartt gone?
Review: What have ten years done to Donna Tartt? As one reviewer put it, in recent photos she looks uptight like she's just sucked on a lemon, and now she has written this lemon of a book! She seems to take herself VERY seriously. And it has taken a toll on her writing. Is she suffering an identity crisis? She seems to be torn between art and entertainment. If she really wants to write poetry like Eliot then she shouldn't be writing novels for the common folk. The Little Friend is, to be kind about it, not the most exciting read. Tartt may be in love with the sound of her own voice, but it's presumptuous of her to think anyone else will love it. In ten years, she has become more academic than she was before. The Secret History was one of my favorite books. I sincerely hope she gets down off her high horse and writes something enjoyable again.

Rating:
Summary: Soured on Tartt
Review: I read The Secret History and fell in love. The relationship lasted ten years. Tartt seemed cool, a talented chick with integrity. But our love affair is over. A little friend came between us. A little friend who is definitely not cool. Donna's not the same writer I fell for. Maybe success went to her head. The Little Friend is too rich for my blood. But Donna's in another stratosphere now. She's left her people behind and taken up with some rarified cats. I wish my baby would come back down to earth and get real again. Get writing good again.

Rating:
Summary: Re-read the Secret History instead!
Review: After a decade of anticipation, I was very disappointed. This book was very difficult to read. Some of the passages rambled for pages. After reading some of the flashback or dream passages, I had to go back several pages to see where the main story line left off. This book could have been a couple of hundred pages shorter with all the drivel cut out, and still been just as good (or bad). I think this is the only book (in 30+ years of reading) I have ever fell asleep trying to read. Save yourself the money, and reread The Secret History again. Ms Tartts sophmore effort fails.

Rating:
Summary: Not easy...not disappointing either!
Review: The Little Friend is not the fast read that The Secret History was, at least for me. And I sense that it wasn't easy to write either; it has the feel of hard writing, arduous writing, writing that gave the author little of the hedonic compensation that writing can give when it's fun, that ego-hit of oh-I'm-good that leads us on and keeps us going before a work has an audience. In the final product there's nothing cheap, nothing facile, at all. If you're like me, you'll want to read it in several dedicated sessions, slowly and carefully. It is not an indulgent book that'll let you read it while on the edge of sleep or through distractions. The characters are not conventionally appealing either, much as Flannery O'Connor's characters were not; they are people I'd just as soon not know personally. But they attain something deeper than conventional appeal.

I know a lot of people who don't like the book; they didn't enjoy it as they enjoyed the first one. It's more demanding and less conventionally gratifying, true, but in it a different and graver game is being played.

Rating:
Summary: The Little Friend
Review: I had to chose between TSH and TLF in the book store. A friend said she'd loan me TLF, so I bought TSH and loved every page of it. I thought the first chapter of TLF was more compelling than TSH, so I couldn't wait to dive in. Now that I have finished the book, I am very dissapointed. I skimmed several pages at the time, since they were just descriptions and had nothing to do with the story. I get the feeling that Tartt wrote a chapter every few years, so she didn't notice her love affair with the words "rictus," "cravenly," and "to and fro" that she reapeated several times. I actually liked the character of Harriet, but I thought that most of the other characters were too callous to be true. Hely adores Harriet, and then he just vanishes from the story and when he returns for a few pages, he could care less about his friend, so who was the little friend in the story anyway? Why make me want to know who killed Robin more than anything and then give me nothing? I felt like Tartt didn't know what to do with the book, so she just stopped typing. There are moments when the book is funny and well-written, but overall there is no common thread other than everyone turns out to be selfish and cruel. Why does Ida make such an abrupt change in her feelings toward the two girls, or was she pretending the entire time? Couldn't someone have been slightly caring in the book, even toward children? If this was Tartt's first novel, we would have never learned of her existance because it would have only met with rejection letters. The book is a wandering mess that only left me with frustration because of the bleak life the flat characters live and the story of Robin's murder was just a trick to make you read in hopes of finding out the only compelling aspect of the entrie book. If the living characters had some resolutions( good or bad) to their conflicts, I could have lived with the frustration of not finding out who was Robin's killer (and might have even admired Tartt for not telling), but as it is the story is a waste of time.

Rating:
Summary: Hard to Believe
Review: It's hard for me to believe that some reviewers, who evidently like literary fiction, would give this book a bad review. It just goes to show it takes all kinds. I loved the book and have recommended it to several friends. I thought the characters came alive off the page, and the plot moved along nicely. It was so interesting, I couldn't put it down and lost a lot of sleep trying to finish it. I loved the ending and Tartt's use of the water tower was foreshadowed well and rounded up everything perfectly. The only reason I gave it four stars instead of five was because there is no easy solution at the end. It left me wanting a little more, but other than that, it was A plus.