books

A decade after The Secret History announced one of the most distinctive voices in American fiction, Donna Tartt returned with a novel that arrived burdened by expectation and, depending on whom you ask, either honoured or squandered it. The Little Friend is a strange, sprawling, beautifully written book that refuses almost every contract a reader expects it to sign - and your response to it will depend entirely on how much you mind being left holding an unfulfilled promise.

The premise is irresistible. On Mother's Day in Alexandria, Mississippi, nine-year-old Robin Cleve Dufresnes is found hanging from a tree in his own front yard. The murder is never solved. Twelve years later his youngest sister, Harriet - a baby when it happened, now a fierce, bookish, faintly terrifying girl of twelve - decides over one long summer that she will find the killer herself. Armed with the certainties of Kipling and Stevenson and the loyal, hapless company of her friend Hely, she fixes on the dissolute Ratliff family and sets in motion a chain of events far darker and more dangerous than anything her adventure stories prepared her for.

What follows is not, in any conventional sense, a mystery. It is worth saying this plainly, because the single most common reaction to the book is the feeling of a broken bargain. You open with a death, you read six hundred pages of very small type, and you reasonably assume you will be told who did it, and how, and why. Tartt has no intention of telling you. The murder is the engine of the family's grief, not a puzzle to be cracked, and by the final pages the case is exactly as open as it was at the start. For some readers this is an unforgivable bait-and-switch, like going to see a beloved band and watching them play nothing but the experimental new material. For others it is the entire point - a book about how a terrible act warps a family rather than how it gets resolved.

If you can make peace with that, there is an enormous amount to admire, and even the disappointed rarely fault the prose. Tartt's gift for character and atmosphere is fully intact here. She summons the heat and torpor of the Mississippi summer, the suffocating rituals of a faded Southern family, and the particular cruelty of childhood's end with a panoramic, hold-you-captive intensity; she can spend pages on a walk around the block and make you grateful for it. Her real subject is the underbelly of Southern life - denial, class division, racial fault lines, self-righteous arrogance - all delivered through character rather than lecture, with a cynical, unsentimental glare that draws blood without ever feeling cheap. Harriet herself is a marvellous creation, level-headed and reckless by turns, and the chaotic, drug-soaked Ratliffs are rendered with a queasy vividness that lingers.

The flaws are real and worth naming honestly. The book is long, and it feels long. The cast is vast - sisters, grandmother, great-aunts, the housekeeper Ida, an ever-widening circle of secondary players - and Tartt lavishes so much attention on establishing each of them that the central question can vanish for stretches at a time. More than one reader has reached the halfway mark uncertain what the book is actually about: a coming-of-age story, a portrait of class in the American South, a meditation on grief, a thriller that keeps forgetting to thrill. The investigation that supposedly drives everything is intermittent and oddly low-stakes for long stretches, before erupting into a flurry of genuine menace in the closing chapters. The departure of Ida, the one source of warmth in Harriet's neglected life, lands harder than most of the plot machinery around it.

So this is a divisive book, and deliberately so. Approach it as a detective story and you will likely finish it - if you finish it at all - feeling cheated and a little exhausted. Approach it as a gothic study of childhood, evil, and the things that harden in us as we grow up, and it becomes something richer and stranger: a coming-of-age tale wearing the costume of a murder mystery. It is the least loved of Tartt's three novels, and it is easy to see why. But the writing is never less than accomplished, and the atmosphere it builds is hard to shake. Come for the dead boy in the tree, by all means - but stay for everything Tartt is actually interested in, which is almost everything except the answer.