Donna Tartt: The Little Friend

By MARGIE THOMSON

It's billed as the publishing event of the year, a novel so anticipated yet so closely guarded that anybody privileged with an advance copy virtually signed their life away to get it.

If they should so much as breathe a word before the release date, today, they would be hung, drawn and quartered, such was the mystique surrounding this second novel, by the author of cult thriller The Secret History, that fans have waited 10 long years for.

Worth the wait? Tartt's writing remains extraordinarily evocative but it will be only the most devoted readers who will be able to let appreciation of her brilliance override their frustration at the languid pace of the action.

What were the editors thinking? It's huge - 555 pages - and one really wants to shake those who had the chance to make it a little leaner and meaner, less indulgent of its author and more reader-friendly. Is Bloomsbury simply too intimidated by the size of the author's reputation to dare cutting her down to size?

The story has a very small frame. It takes place in the small southern Mississippi town of Alexandria (the kind of town in which Tartt herself was raised), almost entirely within the few weeks of one summer holiday, 1976.

Yet the small frame belies Tartt's scope, and into the picture she packs the full flavour of America's South, of social stultification and inevitable change; black housekeepers and white trash; the gulf separating old and young; the pain of growing up; the reverberations of inconsolable grief - and, of course, the plot that drives this soupy story forward.

On Mother's Day 1964, 9-year-old Robin Cleve Dufresnes is murdered, hanged in a tree in his own yard. The murderer was never identified, and 12 years later his sister, 12 1/2-year-old Harriet, sets out to uncover the mystery and exact the penalty.

Harriet is an unusual child, an outsider and virtual loner, and a great reader, especially of adventure stories.

She fixes her suspicions on Danny Ratcliff, a ruffian contemporary of Robin's, and undertakes various harebrained schemes to punish him, involving poisonous snakes and loaded guns.

Her parents are in no position to take interest in their daughter's activities. Her father moved away after Robin's death; her mother, permanently befuddled with prescription drugs, has scarcely emerged from her bedroom since.

Harriet's chief loves are the black housekeeper Ida and a quartet of old ladies, her grandmother Edie and great-aunts Libby, Tat and Adelaide, but these relationships are all stunted because no one sees anyone else for who they are in any real, emotional sense.

Completely understandable in a child, this fact makes the adults in The Little Friend all seem heartless and unlikeable (except for Aunt Libby who speaks just about the only compassionate line, the only statement of simple truth, in the novel: "It's awful being a child, always at the mercy of other people.").

A sense of claustrophobia and smothering haunts the pages: characters are always peering helplessly into the glare, unable to distinguish people and objects; Harriet's mother's house fills with rubbish until there is no room to move, and no one seems to notice; Harriet is rebuffed with stony silence when she goes in search of information about her brother and his death.

Storylines emerge like threats or promises, only to become false trails: Harriet's older sister Allison, now 16, was on the porch when Robin was murdered and probably has the memory of it trapped somewhere inside her. Her emotional state - deeply traumatised, infantile - is revealed a number of times yet never resolved, and the expectation that she will somehow contribute to an outcome dies as she all but vanishes from the narrative in the final chapters.

Red herrings such as this abound, as if Tartt is deliberately teasing us with conventional plots and our own expectations - or perhaps she, too, is a victim of her own narrative drift. Allison's relationship with a boy who had been a friend of Robin's seems a possibility for plot development but in the end remains indistinct and irrelevant; Aunt Libby's story of finding a man's hat on her bed around the time of Robin's death goes nowhere; the many long dialogues that we hope will be meaningful in terms of the plot, turn out not to be.

What all these dead-ends do achieve is a sense of dislocation between characters, and that seems to be at the heart of Tartt's purpose. She offers us a complicated web of misunderstandings and incorrect assumptions, as her characters go about their business, each with their own agenda.

Empathy and insight are in short supply, and it is only Danny Ratcliff (a complex mixture of villain and innocent) who admits his own bewilderment: "Who you? What you want with me? What are you doing up here?" he shouts. Harriet, though, has already passed judgment and tells him nothing of her purpose.

When Tartt hits her stride, she is a wonderful writer. There is real beauty here (for instance: "The story was worn nearly transparent, radiant but oddly featureless, as the lives of saints sometimes are."). Her evocations of the social and geographical landscape of Mississippi are truly powerful. When the action finally arrives, it's really exciting.

She captures the loneliness and pain of childhood utterly convincingly. With no adult to help her, Harriet always realises too late the consequences of her own actions. Her anxiety and guilt, her sense of responsibility for the world are all wholly believable, as is her transference of blame for her family's dysfunction onto hapless Danny Ratcliff.

"Innocent until proven guilty" is not a popular concept in Harriet's world (nor in Danny's: it is he and his deranged brother who go shooting at blacks down by the river), and even a reader can sometimes forget that Harriet's entire adventure is based on something very different from evidence.

In parts brilliant, incredibly moving, sad and brutal. It's just such a shame about those tedious driftings.

* Bloomsbury $39.95