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Murder Is Like a Bowl of Pasta...
A Review by Tom Chiarella

Murder is pretty much the pasta of American literature these days: Serve it up any way you want, but when you get beyond the presentation, underneath all the sauce, it's still just grain — wheat, semolina, flour. Same stuff they use to make white bread. So when a book opens with the murder of a nine-year-old boy (hung in his own front yard), as does Donna Tartt's long-awaited second novel, The Little Friend, it is not wildly unrealistic to expect the book to notch itself downward, entering a predictable orbit of family grief and reconciliation, with perturbations of epiphany thrown in for good measure. The cast left behind — the bitter, destroyed mother, the requisite detached father, the boy's two younger sisters, who hardly remember him — struggles in the ways one would expect, alternately with his absence and with the near-mythic legacy of his death.

What's different here is that Tartt is able to quietly transform the book from a patient study of a family's disassembly and despair to a gut-thumping story of a little girl seeking a measure of understanding and well-deserved revenge. As the villains reveal themselves and the girl pulls the story closer to the surface, it becomes clear that the grand opening act is not a cheap hook but a promise to the reader. Tartt lives up to it. Though absent of the twisted sexual tension of East Coast blue bloods that so thoroughly inhabited The Secret History, Tartt's first novel, The Little Friend is a more focused read, a deeper exploration of the dark manner in which the past never leaves us alone. Like all good books of murder and revenge, as with all good plates of pasta, the last bites are more important, more defining, than the first.

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