Donna Tartt can do the thrills but not the trauma

Donna Tartt is an expert practitioner of what David Hare has called ‘the higher hokum’. She publishes a long novel every decade or so. Her first book, The Secret History (1992), was about some highly affected college students who took to studying ancient Greek in a cult and murdering one another in Dionysiac revels. It was a genuinely popular success — chic, macabre and supremely well-constructed.

Her second, The Little Friend (2002), pursued a small girl through her attempts to pin the murder of her brother on the wrong culprit. It confirmed Tartt’s gift for an intricate plot, escalating into some furiously exciting action. The handling of suspense in both these novels was first-rate. The aura of class — ancient Greek, Americans called Bunny, Camilla and Julian, the impact of death down the years on child narrators — was inescapable.

And the psychological analysis was enjoyable too, though not especially truthful. One of Tartt’s favourite tropes was to associate the original traumatic event with some quite trivial property. After the death in The Little Friend, we are told that nobody in the family could bear to eat chicken ever again, since that was what was cooking at the time of the hanging. Does it really work like that, or is this the sign of a novelist enjoying herself too much? Still, there are plenty of occasions when readers have happily enjoyed themselves along with Donna Tartt.

Now, another decade on, she’s still at it in The Goldfinch, where the nightmare-food-association role is played by scrambled eggs: ‘All these years later, I can still smell the scrambled eggs they ordered for me; the memory of that heaped plate with the steam coming off it still ties my stomach in knots.’ So here is another study of the long after-effects of a violent death on the lives of the survivors.