The Little Friend - Donna Tartt

I've just finished reading The Little Friend. It was a bit of a struggle to finish it - this is a very long and rambling novel. The plot twists and turns and left me feeling disorientated at several points, and some sentences seem to take on a life of their own and span lines and lines of text.

First of all I should confess that I am not a huge Donna Tartt fan, so I wasn't eagerly anticipating her second novel - hence I waited for it to be published in paperback here in the UK before I read it. I did read The Secret History, and found it gripping and weird enough that I could understand the Tartt 'cult' that grew up around it, without wanting to participate in the hype myself. So any Tartt fans might find my response a bit luke-warm.

I'm not going to attempt a full analysis of the novel - there are plenty of resources available for those who are interested, from fan site purple glitter to a book group reading guide provided by Bloomsbury (clever marketing).

A few thoughts:
Tartt writes from one main and several subsidiary view-points. The book revolves around Harriet, a twelve year-old girl who is looking to revenge the death of her brother Robin, and Harriet's viewpoint is the main one in the novel. I'm not sure that these different viewpoints work - Harriet is a very odd little girl, and the parts of the novel that are written through her eyes (although in the third person) do present a satisfyingly warped view of what is going on. But the mixture of Harriet's viewpoint with that of the adults in the book is a strange one, all the more so because the adults are a very strange lot themselves.

This can be described as a Southern novel, since the events are centred on the town of Alexandria, Mississippi. I think that the novel creates a real sense of place, and I loved the action centred on the white trash family, who are so hopeless and beyond the law that even when they are behaving very badly, we can't help but feel sorry for them.

In fact after putting the novel down, I am left with a sense of pity for all the characters. They are all damaged by a lack of care: Harriet's parents do not care for her; the white trash family are not cared for by society or by the system of welfare; even the hospital does not care effectively for the characters who are admitted to it. Just surviving is difficult for all of them, but I'm not sure whether their battle is against the South, or against the author: they are constantly struggling against the many black and twisted plot devices Tartt throws at them.

Nothing is resolved in the book. Tartt appears to have an unresolved ending in mind right from the start, as discussed in this interview with Robert Birnbaum. I would not have been surprised by the number of threads left hanging loose (characters leave town after an argument and are never heard of again; we don't know what happens to Harriet's parents or whether they start to take better care of her; we don't know whether there are any consequences from the happenings towards the end of the book; we don't know whether Harriet's mother discovers that her husband is living with another woman), except for the big set-piece ending involving guns, cars and near-drownings, which seems to predict some great resolution. Yet it never comes. Was I a frustrated reader? Slightly - but having travelled nearly 600 pages with Harriet and her strange friends and relatives, I was quite content to leave her company. You can't help thinking that she would grow up into a very screwed up woman - maybe she will write a novel about her experiences?