The Little Friend by Donna Tartt

 

Things have been very quiet here on the blog lately. This it due to two main factors: my reading time has been drastically reduced due to grad school, and I was making my way through The Little Friend by  Donna Tartt. This novel was on my 22 in 2022 challenge list, mainly because The Goldfinch is one of my favorite books of all time and I was eager to try more from this author. I initially put off reading this one because of its length. My edition is 624 pages of very small print and I knew it would take me a while to get through. I ended up reading all of the other books on my challenge list first, so with this one being the only one left, it was finally time to pick it up this month.

The plot of the novel follows a precocious twelve year old girl named Harriet, who is growing up the small, backwater town of Alexandria, Mississippi in the 1970s. When Harriet was just a baby, her older brother Robin was murdered, a crime that remained unsolved and devastated her family. Her mother was mentally broken by the death, leaving Harriet and older sister Allison to largely fend for themselves. Harriet has always been fascinated with her late brother, and she vows one day to determine who is responsible and make them pay for their crime. As she starts digging into her troubled family's past her investigations lead her onto a path of self discovery and incredible danger.

I had very mixed feelings about this book. The writing itself was truly excellent and a joy to read, but this story was deeply unsatisfying. The first few pages appeared to set up a murder mystery, but the ensuing 600 pages don't deliver on that premise. Instead, there is a lot of description of various people and places and a lot of story threads that don't seem to add up to anything. The book is most definitely overlong and there were many times during my reading that I was just bored. I kept waiting to get back to the mystery of Robin, but it turns out that Robin's death wasn't the point of the book was at all. What the point was, I don't know. Even after finishing the story, I'm not sure what the point of it all was.

Another aspect of the book that I wasn't sure about was the way Tartt depicted race. This is written in the Southern Gothic style, and set in the deep South in the 1970s, so it makes sense that you'd see racism in it. There were an awful lot of n-words though. It was almost To Kill a Mockingbird levels of n-word. Some parts of the story were about race, so the language wasn't purposeless, but it didn't feel great either. Many of the characters were overtly racist, but what made it even more uncomfortable for me was that the omniscient narrative voice was racist as well. Aside from Harriet occasionally feeling bad about this, these attitudes go unchecked. I would have to imagine that a non-white reader would really struggle with this one. There was also a character with Down's Syndrome that I'm not sure was depicted thoughtfully either.  

Overall, I would say that The Little Friend was a mildly enjoyable read. Tartt is undoubtedly a beautiful writer, but there was not enough plot in this brick of a book. I was ultimately left dissatisfied. I'm not mad that I read this, but it just was not as good as I was expecting it to be based on how much I liked The Goldfinch. 

On a side note, this was my last book in my 22 in 2022 Challenge! Another goal completed!

Challenge Tally

22 in 2022: 22/22 Done!

Total Books Read in 2022: 90