While not as perfectly pitched to appeal to me as The Secret History, I very much like The Little Friend, Tartt's second novel. The first time I read it, a couple of years ago or so, a lot of its charm lay in the central character, Harriet Dufresnes - a precocious, bookish, prickly, and distinctly unlovable little girl preoccupied with solving the mystery of her brother Robin's death (which occurred too early for Harriet to remember, when she was a baby)...given those character traits, it's not hard to see why I like the character so much, I guess.
Anyway, this time round, for one reason and another I happened to be feeling quite sad over the period in which I was reading The Little Friend, and, perhaps for that reason, the sadness which permeates the whole book was at the forefront of my mind throughout. Not only is the entire family haunted by Robin's spectre, but there are other sadnesses too - the old, quiet tragedies of Edie and the aunts, Libby's untimely death, the departure of Ida Rhew, the only sketched-out plight of Lasharon Odum and all the others like her in the background, Danny Ratliff's inability to escape his family and circumstances, the growing away of Hely from Harriet, and, hanging over everything, the oppressive weight of the Mississippi atmosphere and the grim history of that part of America.
There are some loose ends, and things which feel unresolved (most notably, the central mystery regarding how Robin came to be hanged from the old black tupelo tree in the yard on that fateful day), but I don't feel that they particularly detract from the novel, for The Little Friend functions primarily as a treatment of the ramifications and reverberations of loss, secondarily as an imagining of a particular childhood and the passing of much of its innocence, and 'tertiarily' as a study of a certain slice of small-town America of the past - not, in any meaningful sense, as a murder mystery...in its rendition of the latter two, the book has definite shades of To Kill A Mockingbird, and indeed, Tartt seems to nod to Lee's book by including a passing reference to a girl who is a champion baton-twirler (though possibly I'm reading more into that than was intended). In some ways, it's quite a distanced, reserved book, but it speaks to me anyway.
