Nancy Drew with an attitude

The Little Friend
By Donna Tartt
Alfred Knopf,
555 pages
Available at Powerbooks

Ten years ago, novelist Donna Tartt made her debut with The Secret History, a novel about Greek classics students who cover up a murder. It sold millions and was a huge cult favorite among young people and college students, few of whom studied Greek classics.

Now, just as Hollywood is getting around to filming The Secret History, Tartt comes out with her followup, a Southern Gothic murder mystery called The Little Friend. The protagonist is Harriet Cleve Dufresnes, a precocious 12-year-old whose brother Robin was killed – murdered, gruesomely strung-up in a backyard tree – when she was only four. The case remains unsolved, and the horrible event tarnishes and untwines the Dufresnes household, causing the father to leave town and take up with a mistress, and the mother to grow worn-down and distracted in the way of all faded Southern belles.

Harriet is a book-loving, unwashed little tomboy with a bowl haircut who gets into all sorts of adventures and is not afraid to take on any boy in a staring contest. One summer, she gets it into her head to find out who killed her brother ("Who Killed Cock Robin," indeed), and most of the long and winding roads in The Little Friend travel toward unraveling that mystery.

Except they never do, and that’s one of the cheats in Donna Tartt’s opulent and overlong gaze at southern childhood. It never quite fulfills the demands of a murder mystery, and it hardly makes sense as a coming of age tale because Harriet remains as obstinate and wrongheaded at the end of book as she was to begin with.

But none of this really matters, since Tartt doesn’t seem interested in a conventional heroine by any stretch. By most accounts, Harriet is a lot like Tartt: A book-loving child who gobbled up classics like Treasure Island and The Jungle Book (the Kipling, not the Disney version) and Sherlock Holmes mysteries. Harriet can be quite annoying at times, stubborn and demanding and, well, kind of bratty. She’s also very smart and imaginative, and this quality reminds us of another recent literary heroine: Briony Tallis in Ian McEwan’s Atonement. But let the literary comparisons stop there. The Little Friend is largely an adventure story (though a slow-moving one) with plenty of grotesque atmosphere to call up comparisons with Truman Capote, Flannery O’Connor and Harper Lee.

Jammed with rich southern detail and ’70s pop references, The Little Friend could have easily been trimmed by 200 or so pages. It takes forever to get the story going, and even when it’s off and running (with the addition of the dangerous and ugly Ratliff clan), it still takes weird offroads and digressions that only serve to demonstrate Tartt’s desire to write. The story drawls along like Huckleberry Hound, wrapped in so much kudzu and sycamore and honeysuckle that you want to give it a good push once in a while. And as a main character, Harriet is not the easiest little girl to warm up to:

With distaste, Harriet reflected upon how life had beaten down the adults she knew, every single grown-up. Something strangled them as they grew older, made them doubt their own powers – laziness? Habit? Their grip slackened; they stopped fighting and resigned themselves to what happened. "That’s life." That’s what they all said. "That’s just how it is, Harriet. You’ll see."

Well: Harriet would not see.

Harriet’s main problem is she doesn’t see the point of growing up. She complains about how adults lack verve, pluck or any sense of adventure. But Tartt certainly doesn’t make childhood seem like a bed of roses either. Tartt’s Mississippi is dismal and dire, overgrown and threatened by redneck trash on every corner. Harriet’s idea of fun is reenacting Judas Iscariot’s hanging under the same Tupelo tree her brother was cut down from.

She is nothing if not steely and determined, and begins a regimen of self-discipline training herself to hold her breath underwater like Houdini for three minutes – and dragging her boy sidekick, Hely, along for surveillance missions around town. Her attention focuses on a family of good-for-nothings who may have been skulking around on the day Robin was killed. Her friend Hely observes one of the Ratliffs, Farish, riling up his opponent during a local pool match. It is one of the book’s most interesting passages, suggesting the handed-down futility and resentment that afflict poor southern families.

"This little gal loves her old Diddy, don’t she?" Odum pressed her to his shirt front with tears in his eyes. "She knows her Diddy’s a pore man! She don’t have to have a bunch of old toys and candy and fancy clothes!"

"And why should she?" said Farish abruptly.

Odum – intoxicated by the sound of his own voice – turned foggily and puckered his brow.

"Yeah. You heard right. Why should she have all that mess? Why should any of em have it. We didn’t have anything when we was coming up, did we?"

A slow wave of astonishment illumined Odum’s face.

"Naw, brother!" he cried gaily.

"Was we ashamed of being poor? Was we too good to work? What’s good enough for us is good enough for her, ain’t it?"

"Dern right!"

Low murmurs of approval, from all over the poolroom.

That’s about as deep a social analysis as The Little Friend provides, hinting at the true nature of evil in hard-lived, poorly-examined lives which see no way out but hatred. But The Little Friend has other compensating strengths. Tartt’s dialogue and style have grown much since The Secret History. Many of the scenes are wonderfully written, such as the car crash involving Harriet’s aunties and grandmother Edie and the action sequences which seem tailor-made for the movies.

I must confess to finding the Ratliff clan more engaging characters (as stereotypical as they are) than Harriet and her clan. Sure, they live in a trailer and have a mummified granny wandering around and cook up methamphetamine and handle snakes; but they’re kind of amusing, and bring much-needed zest to The Little Friend, with their drug labs and disfigured faces and dialogue straight out of Dukes of Hazzard. I especially enjoy the way their speed-fueled paranoia causes their own undoing, as they imagine Harriet to be a much more dangerous adversary than a 12-year-old girl with a fixed idea in her head.

With its peculiarly stultified pace and its dense, old-fashioned storytelling, The Little Friend is not going to win any prizes from the literary avant garde. But Tartt probably couldn’t care less. She thinks all novels should be adventure tales anyway. "It just doesn’t seem as though people try anymore," she told Book magazine recently. "Why can’t you have really well-crafted prose with adventure stories? What are novels for if they’re not entertaining? If they’re not entertaining, they’re no good."

Comparisons to Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird are also inevitable, though largely misguided. Sure, both books focus on a tomboyish young girl’s view of life in a Mississippi town. But Harper Lee wisely chose to leave out the poisonous snakes, gunplay and methamphetamine, figuring her message would get across without such distractions. Perhaps Tartt’s latest can better be described as gussied-up Nancy Drew with literary leanings. Yeah, that’s it: Nancy Drew with major attitude.