The back cover of my copy of The Likeness compares French’s novel to Donna Tartt’s The Secret History, so when I realized that Dorothy had a copy (in hardcover, no less), I pulled it off the shelves and found myself immersed in one of the most odd, ambivalent, happy, and annoyed reading states ever. I liked the novel a lot while I also disliked it a lot. I’m not sure which side is winning, but as I think more about how the narrative is structured, and as I see what Tartt is doing (or trying to do) with time and the setting, I sort of want to reevaluate my response and see the problems as strengths, or at least as intentional authorial choices rather than flaws in technique. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
The novel begins with a short prologue that lets us know that the narrator and the rest of his insular group of college students killed one of their own several years earlier. Once this tantalizing tease is set up, the narrator jumps back to fill us in on his background and the events leading up to the murder. Richard Papen is a native Californian who longs to get away from his working class parents and their sharply circumscribed lives, so he, on a whim, applies to Hampden College in Vermont (apparently based on Bennington, where Donna Tartt was an undergraduate in the 1980s). Once in Vermont, Richard endures many of the typical fish out of water experiences that mark college novels, until he falls in with a strange group of undergraduates who are all studying classics. The classics prof is a wealthy eccentric who tutors only a small handful of students, on his own terms, using his own private classroom, all while thumbing his blue-blooded nose at the college administration. Professor Morrow exemplifies the classics, with his deep knowledge of ancient history, languages, art, and culture and a corresponding disdain of modern philistinism. He is a complete aesthete, and probably completely amoral besides.
Richard fellow students are all immensely wealthy, or make a good, Gatsby-esque show of being immensely wealthy. He nevertheless manages to fit in with the group as they lounge in overstuffed chairs and speak to each other in pithy Greek epigrams. Soon, though, problems arise in the group as friendships show strain from unseen horrors. Richard learns that four of the group had been experimenting with Dionysian ritual and had tried to tap into the ancient ecstasy recounted in some of their texts. The ritual is successful, in a sense, but a sort of tragedy (more on the “sort of” later), and one of the friends not involved in the experiment, a blustery New England prepster named Bunny, begins to blackmail the students involved. When the rest of the Greek students can stand Bunny’s increasingly unhinged threats no longer, they push him off a cliff.
This novel is not a mystery–there is no doubt who killed Bunny or why. It is also not a mystery because the police do not suspect foul play. However, the five remaining friends, with guilty thoughts tormenting them and straining their relationships to the suicidal limit, never feel safe despite the lack of police interest. The psychological stress each undergoes provides the real narrative impetus, and in that sense it is a satisfying novel. I found myself obsessed with their torment and Tartt’s narrative strategy to release small pieces of information at a time made me keep turning the pages.
But. But, but, but. For some reason I was frequently irritated by this novel. Part of it was the tone, which felt all wrong. It was fussy and condescending at times, lending an almost anachronistic air to things; I had trouble believing Richard would write this way. It is true that he is writing years after the events, after he has become an English professor, but the tone still felt awkwardly posed, mannerist, and contrived. The characters were also far too odd and eccentric. Bunny, who comes from a New England banking family with a very expensive reputation to maintain, talked, I thought, too much like a parody of Fitzgerald. Did any college student in the 1980s (when I presume this was set–the timeline is not clear, either, something else that annoyed me) call his friends “old boy” like a bluff, dense, country squire from a Dorothy Sayers novel? And then there are the class issues. Richard is very poor, but somehow immediately blends in with the rich preppy kids, wearing tweed suits and vintage ties (really?) around campus. Furthermore, in their Dionysian experiment, the four rich kids accidentally kill an old Vermont farmer. Because it is done in the spirit of aesthetic and intellectual curiosity, the murder seems like no big deal. Their professor, when he hears about it, is more excited that they were successful in their attempts to reach some ecstatic peak than in the death of some poor farmer. It reeks of noblesse oblige and makes me more angry the more I think about it.
It was a good, interesting story, but it has left me in turmoil as I fight myself about its final merits.
The Hobgoblin of Little Minds 
I actually never got to the end of this. Which at the time felt bad because it was such a big book over here and I was a lot younger and inclined to feel bad if I couldn’t finish something. Very interesting review, which illuminates much for me after all these years. Oh and I bought The Likeness a couple of days ago – must read In The Woods now.
I read this for my book club last year and the book is in Berlin while I am in Munich, but let me say that I actually thought (wrongly or not) that the book was not modern, that is, set back in the 60\’s, not 80\’s. I also didn\’t lve it. Now I\’ll need to go examine it more carefully to see why I felt this way.
G–I felt the same way about the time period. I am only guessing the 80s because of a couple of references that are vague enough to pass over. At one point, Richard says something about hearing rap music, and one of the characters mentions taking Ecstasy, which wasn’t on the scene until the 1980s. Your point, though, is important–such a vague time frame made me uneasy with the details.
Anon–Don’t feel bad about that! It was a readable book, but certainly not something to arouse guilt if you didn’t finish it. Despite my relative enjoyment of it, I found the last 50 pages to drag.
I read this book when it first came out, and like you, felt somewhat ambivalent about it while reading it, but ultimately came to the conclusion that I didn’t like it — most especially not enough to read her next one when it came out to rave reviews. Tartt seemed to be trying too hard to prove her own cleverness and knowledge to write believable characters, and then, there were certain details (I didn’t know it at the time, because I was not yet a professional editor) that a good editor should have questioned (e.g. the students listening to CDs if they were in college in the mid-’80s or before. I know these were meant to be extraordinarily rich and preppy students, but I attended a university with those sorts and lived in 1986-1987 with a bunch of students from a different rich, preppy school of that sort, and they were still all listening to LPs on turntables — even if they were Bang and Olusfen turntables). An author who decides to write about very recent past history had better make sure she gets all her details correct for those of us who have lived through it. Otherwise, the reader is tempted to question if she really has all the details of a classics education correct.