A SECOND ACT? :

The Secret History: Whatever happened to Donna Tartt? (Boyd Tonkin, 21 May 2002, The Independent)

Beyond any doubt, the [new] book will surprise readers who expect more of the Tartt recipe as before. She has disclosed that "when I was writing this book I was thinking very much about Stevenson, whom I love, very much about Treasure Island and the pirates". She has called it "a book about children - but not for children. It's a... scary book about children coming contact with the world of adults, in a very frightening way." The ride will be scary, perhaps, for Bloomsbury's shareholders as well.

At least Tartt has made it to this second hurdle. The story of modern American literature is littered with promising names who fell after the first. In 1952, Ralph Ellison shocked white society with his exposure of the black plight in Invisible Man, only to slide into a bruising life-long tussle with the sequel, left uncompleted at his death in 1994. No book in publishing history has ever sold faster than Gone With The Wind, which Margaret Mitchell followed up with... precisely nothing. In 1960, Nelle Harper Lee from Alabama produced one of the 20th century's best-beloved novels, To Kill a Mockingbird. Then she settled back into small-town seclusion, writing nothing more (unless, that is, you're prepared to credit the fascinating notion that she had a hand in the true-crime classic In Cold Blood by her childhood playmate, Truman Capote).

It could be something in the humid Southern air that mocks the Yankee urge to endless productivity.

The prospect of Stevenson filtered through The Secret History raises expectations even higher than they would normally be for a novel that's taken ten years. Let's hope she can pull it off. Posted by Orrin Judd at August 18, 2002 10:45 AM