While there was plenty of food mentioned in The Secret History by Donna Tartt, I had to highlight the scene with the cherries. It so perfectly encapsulates how ridiculous the characters are, while also showing how they’re all spiraling out of control.
For some time I had been staring at the jar of cherries without realizing fully what they were. “Why are you eating those?” I said.
The Secret History by Donna Tartt
“I don’t know,” he said, staring down at the jar. “They taste really bad.”
“Throw them away.”
He struggled with the window sash. It sailed up with a grinding noise.
A blast of icy air hit me in the face. “Hey,” I said.
He threw the jar out the window and then leaned on the sash with all his weight. I went over to help him. Finally, it crashed down, and the juice had left a spattered red trajectory on the snow.
“Kind of a Jean Cocteau touch, isn’t it?” Francis said.
The Secret History follows a group of college students who murder one of their friends. No spoilers here. The reader learns of the murder in the first two pages. The story is told from the perspective of an unreliable narrator with zero main character energy named Richard. Richard has escaped his small California town for a liberal arts college in Vermont. He falls in with an exclusive, pretentious group of students studying Greek and through Richard we watch how the group turns on one of their own and the subsequent unraveling–throwing cherry jars out windows included.
It’s a suspenseful dark academia psychological thriller. The writing is beautiful and soaked in allusions. I loved it when I read it at 18 and loved it this time around. It’s a story that sticks with you. Like, the characters are absolutely horrible, but I could also talk about them all day long.
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