A Child's Ignorance and Knowingness

...Smoke puffing [sic] from a rusty little metal stovepipe, up top, when Edie had stopped by one winter evening with Harriet in the car, bringing fruitcake and tangerines for Ida's Christmas...

...They have fallen on hard times...

...Misled by the black Ida Rhew's prejudice against the town's "white trash," of which the pre-emiexample is the hapless and unattractive Ratliff family, Harriet begins to suspect 21 - year-old Danny Ratliff, who had been Robin's contemporary, of having killed him...

...She presents certain scenes with a wonderful sense of detail and reality...

...The world Tartt presents to us has a rare immediacy and reality...

...As well she might, for The Little Friend is set in small-town Mississippi in the 1970s, the same period and place Tartt herself grew up in...

...Robin had been playing in his yard along with his sisters, four-year-old Allison and baby Harriet, while the adults were inside preparing Mother's Day lunch...

...The Cleves, the novel's central family, belong to the genteel, bridge-playing, churchgoing, more or less benign milieu that Eudora Welty, Tartt's fellow Mississippian, portrayed so brilliantly in The Optimist's Daughter...

...Dial, but other, more subtle aspects of the adult world escape her...

...The older sister, Allison, is dream-bound and spacey-the trauma of her brother's death, to which she must have been a mute witness, has emotionally stunted her...

...Although sales were brisk, critical opinion was carping, and no more was heard of Tartt...

...Robin's grandmother, the tough, competent Edith, has developed a practically impermeable crust, and her three gentler sisters have suffered from the loss too...

...Tartt is really impressive in her ability to enter, with sympathy and credibility, into the Ratliffs' world, and even, with a certain respectful distance, into Ida's...

...No one was ever able to discover the killer, and every family member has been permanently scarred by the tragedy...

...Ida retreats forever into her mysterious other life, the black world that the white characters can never presume to penetrate...

...Harriet and Allison are left bereft...

...What did they leave behind...

...Harriet, blinkered by her own obsession, sees him only as a thug...

...Harriet, however, can only observe one side of her, the side she presents to the white world...

...Without goals, we're not financially prosperous...

...But now her new novel, The Little Friend, has appeared, and the news is that it is very good: very readable, written with a kind of erudition Tartt was only able to strain for in her first outing, and blessedly devoid of pretension...

...one senses that she knows her subject intimately...

...The Ratliff brothers are young men for whom there has never been any real hope...

...Too often the demands of the plot are put aside to make room for Tartt's fine writing and acute observations...

...Unwittingly she thus gets involved in his family's violent, selfdestructive story...

...Where is Addie's pocketbook?-raises the reader's own blood pressure with reawakened memories of family outings past...

...The problem with The Secret History was that it wasn't particularly good, or at least did no better than fit the general pattern of debut novels: literate and sometimes elegant, but full of preposterous characters and high intellectual pretension...

...Ida's personal life, her home, are off-limits: "Whenever they needed to get in touch with Ida, Edie had to get in the car and drive over to Ida's house-which wasn't even a house, only a lopsided brown shack in a yard of packed dirt, no grass and no sidewalk, just mud...

...By contrast, Harriet is a sharp, judgmental, intelligent child who has been nourished, for want of any viable alternative, on the conventions of her favorite adventure writers: Robert Louis Stevenson, Rudyard Kipling and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle...

...Did Tartt herself attend such an institution...

...No one, not even the businesslike Edith, realizes the extent of Charlotte's withdrawal...

...Without goals, we aren't motivated, are we...

...With dogged ruthlessness she takes suspicion for fact and begins to harass Danny and snoop around after him...

...The Little Friend, though, is essentially about childhood, and about the child's clear yet so frequently distorted or onesided vision of life...

...And the little tests of kindness and communication that Harriet, Charlotte and Ida each fail in turn indicate their sad, all too human limitations...

...Still, in its recreation of a whole small world, The Little Friend must be accounted a major success...

...It brings Harriet to a certain emotional resting point, but gives scant indication of her further development...

...And the blow-by-painful-blow description of the four elderly Cleve sisters as they head off on a car trip to North CarolinaShould the window be open or closed...

...The great 19th-century family house, Tribulation, burned down a decade previously and each member of the extended Cleve clan feels, to one degree or another, a corresponding diminution not simply in status but in the richness and fullness of life...

...The next, Eugene, knows only one outlet for his essential decency, the charismatic Christian movement...

...Eleven years before the beginning of the action one of the Cleve grandchildren, nine-year-old Robin Dufresnes, was mysteriously murdered...

...Ida hadn't let them in, but the glimpse through the open door had flooded Harriet with confusion and sadness: old coffee cans, an oilcloth-covered table, the raggedy old smoky-smelling sweater-a man's sweater-that Ida wore in the wintertime, hanging on a peg...

...Just as Tartt captures the social isolation of lower-class whites in Southern towns, she deals well with the time-honored and unbridgeable gap between black and white, and the races' gross financial inequity...

...Reviewed by Brooke Allen Contributor, New York "Times Book Review," "New Criterion," "Atlantic Monthly" Plenty OF books have had their share of media attention over the past decade or so, but probably few got as much as Donna Tartt's The Secret History (1992...

...Ida Rhew, an imperfect but largely sympathetic woman, is the closest thing Harriet has to a mother, and represents most of what she knows of love...

...Danny, who began life as a gentle, friendly soul, struggles vainly to escape from his family's centrifugal pull of crime and drugs...

...The reader can understand Danny's fumbling for independence and honest work as tragic...

...Their parents died young and they have been raised by their grandmother, Gum, a consummately repulsive character who controls her progeny through a combination of goading and brutal criticism...

...Like its literary predecessors, A High Wind in Jamaica and Lord of the Fliesand like the children's classic, Harriet the Spy, that Tartt further echoes, whether consciously or unconsciously-The Little Friend deals with childhood's Janus faces, ignorance and knowingness...

...Harriet's arrival at a hair-raisingly awful Christian summer camp, for example, is presented with the vital force of memory...

...she misinterprets as much as she understands...

...The Little Friend is not without faults: It is too long, and the elasticity of its narrative stretches dangerously loose...

...Ida's eventual departure from the Dufresnes household, precipitated by a series of foolish misunderstandings and thoughtless acts, takes on the inevitability of tragedy...

...An earlier, more cruel, event has also shaped the family...

...Harriet is brilliant when it comes to uncovering the phoniness of the adult world...

...Brought up in the shadow of her brother's death, she decides at this point to solve Robin's murder and bring the killer to justice...

...The memory of Ida appearing in the doorway-surprised, in the car headlights, wiping her hands on a dirty apron-choked Harriet with a sudden, sharp grief...

...The ending is also irresolute, almost arbitrary, not really an ending at all...

...Her career was beginning to look like a one-shot phenomenon...

...The now 12-year-old Harriet Cleve Dufresnes has, despite the plethora of adults in her life, been left largely to her own devices...

...For instance, she mercilessly observes her Sunday School teacher, Mr...

...Let's think about this, shall we...

...Tartt, again like Eudora Welty, proves to be a master of the set piece...

...Tartt has, belatedly, won a place somewhere near the top of the heap...

...Somehow, during this brief interval, someone managed to hang the boy in a tupelo tree in the dark corner of the garden...

...Dial, a car dealer with his eye ever on the main chance: "'Why is it so important to have goals in life, boys and girls?' As he waited for an answer, he squared and resquared a small stack of paper on the podium, so that the jewel in his massive gold class ring caught and flashed red in the light...

...Robin's mother, Charlotte, spends most of her days in bed with tranquilizers, leaving the upbringing of her daughters to the housekeeper, Ida Rhew...

...The two older brothers have become what society knows as hardened criminals...

...Without goals, we can't achieve what Christ wants forus as Christians and members of the community!'" ARRET IS ABLE to see right through a Mr...

...Charlotte's husband, Dix Dufresnes, lives a separate life in far-off Nashville, consoling himself with fast women and hunting cronies...