The Little Friend

The Little Friend by Donna Tartt (2002) As I’m still working on a novel set in the early 1970s about kids in the 12 to 15 year-old range, I was looking for more inspiration/comfort from books I’d missed and realized this one is right there. As much as I liked Donna Tartt’s other two books, I don’t know why I’d shied away from this one—because, of course it’s smart, engaging, well-written, crazy, fun, and a page-turner—what was I thinking? Even more odd, is that it centers on a family in a small town in Mississippi who are forever under the shadow of a (apx.) 1964 tragedy—same year as our family tragedy—and the surviving siblings are very close to the same age as my brother and I. The similarities end there, but that’s enough to be a little spooky—and relatable. The event in the book is the death of the older brother, Robin, who was found hanged—was it an accident, suicide, or a murder? The story unfolds with our main character, 12-year-old Harriet, intent on solving the mystery by continuing to dredge up what pretty much everyone else would like to have fade into the past. She’s a great character, odd and determined—the obvious comparisons are, of course, Harriet M. Welsch and Mattie Ross—though I’m sure there are many more influences that inform her intense complexity—no doubt, even, young Donna Tartt. I was happiest in this book whenever we were with Harriet, but it’s quite an expansive story, from the point of view of many characters, including more time than you ever thought you’d spend with an insane family of paranoid, psychotic methamphetamine dealers and addicts. I liked it, though, particularly because I was able to find empathy with Harriet’s primary murder suspect—not that he’s a good person—but the heart of the story ultimately is Harriet’s moral crisis about whether she’d wrongly accused him—which is slowly yet powerfully developed. Along the way, then, are a lot of characters, a vivid portrait of a time and place, and some horror—even worse than the meth-heads and the poisonous snakes was the mortifying depiction of Harriet’s Christian summer camp.

8.2.26