Review: The Little Friend

Donna Tartt’s Southern Gothic opus begins with an inexplicable murder of a young innocent boy in the family yard.

It’s this memory that haunts his young twelve-year-old sister, Harriet Dufresnes. A brazen child so obstinate and argumentative, she makes Scout Finch look like a lackadaisical underachiever.

Our young protagonist has decided, with the sort of iron-willed certainty that only the very young and very foolish possess, to solve the decade-old murder of her brother Robin.

Magnolias, decaying mansions, and family secrets - so many secrets, so many long-buried scandals.

The plot, such as it is, involves snake-handling religious fanatics, drug dealers with improbable names, and enough generational family dysfunction to fuel a small university’s psychology department for several semesters.

The book’s greatest strength lies in its atmospheric rendering of childhood’s peculiar blend of powerlessness and grandiosity - the way children can simultaneously feel utterly insignificant and completely certain that they alone understand the world’s true workings. 

Its greatest weakness, perhaps, is the author’s apparent inability to resist any opportunity for elaborate description, resulting in passages that linger over the minutiae of setting with lyricism to spare.

One finishes “The Little Friend” with a curious sense of having been somewhere very specific and beautifully rendered, though perhaps having taken rather longer to arrive there than strictly necessary.

The mystery at the heart of the novel remains tantalisingly unresolved, which will either strike readers as brilliantly true to life or frustratingly unsatisfying, depending upon their tolerance for ambiguity and their expectations regarding the obligations of crime fiction.

In the end, it succeeds as a meditation on childhood, memory, and grief.