When I worked as an editor at Orbis Books from 2012 to 2017, I reverse-commuted every day on the Metro-North from the Bronx up to our offices on the campus of the Maryknoll Fathers and Brothers in Ossining, N.Y. It was a bit of a haul, but the hour-long trip was against the massive inbound traffic of commuters, so instead of being packed like a sardine into an overcrowded train, I could usually spread out across the seats and read (or, on the way home, nap). Over time, I was able to train my body to wake up when I got close to my stop at Spuyten Duyvil in the afternoons, lest I find myself suddenly on the way to Grand Central or to Peekskill. 

Donna Tartt ruined that.

I was a classics and philosophy major in college and spent a year after in a doctoral program for Classical Philosophy, but until 2013, I had never read The Secret History. I realize that to other Greek and Latin nerds this sounds insane: If you were a classics student in the 1990s, you had heard of it for sure, and were talking about it over terrible red wine in a professor’s backyard. If I remember correctly, the older student who first mentioned it to me was kind of a creeper, so I stayed away.

But in the fall of 2013, I started reading The Secret History on the train. And I missed my stop—in both directions—half a dozen times. You owe me, Donna Tartt.

It wasn’t just the language or the plot, both of which were captivating. The Secret History, centered around a tiny group of classics majors and their professors at a liberal arts school in the Northeast, reopened a world I had forgotten about: what it was like to be a student of Greek and Latin in college. None of my collegiate peers in the 1990s had killed anyone (I mean, as far as I know) like some of the characters in The Secret History, but I recognized myself, my teachers and my friends in those characters. A small department with dynamic mentors; a feeling of elite companionship; a shared heritage of nights hunting through the Liddell & Scott Greek dictionaries (we used “The Middle Liddell,” to be distinguished from its further-abridged cousin “The Little Liddell” and its fat kin “The Great Scott”); a robust social life peppered with the presence of erudite scholars; and, to be fair, a silent recognition that we were all huge nerds. 

Tartt’s characters were rather more precocious than students at your average striving Jesuit university in the 1990s; the students at Tartt’s Hampden College were more Haverford or Swarthmore than they were Loyola This or Loyola That. But the world Tartt created was somewhat familiar, even 15 years later.

It has been 34 years now since that book was published, and yet I was surprised just this summer to find out that Donna Tartt was a Catholic convert. I wouldn’t consider The Secret History to be a Catholic novel (others would disagree), and yet this was an intriguing bit of information. Was this book Tartt’s homage to Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited? Were there parallels to be found in the book to some of Christianity’s core themes? My God, was this book by a Mississippi-born writer a Southern Gothic in the Catholic style?

Donna Tartt was born in Greenwood, Miss., in 1963. She recalled in a 2002 interview that her early education included large amounts of memorization, including passages from the King James Bible (and, on her own, memorizing poems by A. A. Milne). She published her own first poem in The Mississippi Review in 1976 when she was 13. After a year at the University of Mississippi, she transferred to Hampden Bennington College in Vermont, the obvious inspiration for her debut novel. Tartt graduated in 1986 and published The Secret History six years later.

Her next novel, The Little Friend, was set in Mississippi. Though Tartt had published short stories and lectured widely in the intervening years, its publication in 2002 made it clear that Tartt took her time with each novel: Sure enough, 11 more years would pass before The Goldfinch was published. 

While The Goldfinch won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2014, we forget that it originally drew mixed reviews; James Wood compared it to a Harry Potter novel. But for some America contributors, The Goldfinch is Tartt’s true masterpiece. “Tartt has an indulgent, Dickensian affinity for detail, which I immediately glommed onto,” Brandon Sanchez wrote in 2019. “But she’s not an apostle of David Foster Wallace’s maximalist, meta-referential, gooey-yet-aloof ‘New Sincerity.’ Instead, The Goldfinch mines the 19th century, unspooling into a neo-picaresque delight. Tartt makes sentimentality feel cool, vitally human. She is serious but has a sense of humor. I just want to luxuriate in her prose and stay forever. Owning one of her novels, I have found, is like owning a nice, finely woven area rug.”

While the movie version of The Goldfinch is well worth a watch, Sanchez wrote, “Some things you just need to read.”

While Tartt has told reporters she is at work on her next novel, she is famously private about her personal affairs. She has been linked for many years with Neal Guma, an art gallery owner to whom The Little Friend is dedicated. Tartt has also spoken only rarely about her own religious beliefs, though a 2000 essay, “The Spirit and Writing in a Secular World,” gave some clues as to her worldview. Perhaps more can be found in her 1999 essay for The Oxford American, “Spirituality in the Modern Novel,” where she suggested her writing was a form of prayer. 

“As a novelist who happens to be a Roman Catholic, faith is vital in the process of making my work and in the reasons I’m driven to make it,” she wrote. Calling a novel “a finger pointing at the moon,” she described later in the essay her own sense of vocation: 

Writers are entertainers. Basically, we all lie for a living, and any novelist who feels too puffed up with the spiritual importance and nobility of his work would do well to consider if he wouldn’t be serving mankind far better by opening up a soup kitchen or working among the homeless. But the theatrics and mischief of storytelling can also be a vehicle for getting in touch with the deepest and most serious spiritual truths—truths of fate and coincidence, of suffering and justice, of life and death. For myself, as a religious person in a decidedly secular and nonreligious profession, it’s a question of using the gifts I was given on their own terms, and having faith that God can choose to manifest Himself even in the trickery and sleight of hand that—as an illusionist—is my trade.

The characters of The Secret History do indeed find themselves struggling with the “truths of fate and coincidence, of suffering and justice, of life and death.” Tartt’s dramatic story is the vehicle that gets them—and the reader—to that place. The mark of a great novel, no?

One last thing: While we’re on the topic of The Secret History, this defense of the study of Latin and Greek (as if such a high and lonely destiny needed any justification) from Kevin Spinale, S.J., deserves merit alongside the several—O.K., dozens of—encomiums to such study over 117 years of America. Writing in 2021, Father Spinale, now a teacher and administrator at one of the Jesuit high schools in New York, had this to say:

Was eight years of language study in Classical Greek and Latin worth it? Was it worthwhile to expend such labor just to sharpen my comprehension of ancient texts? Is something that enriches my prayer worth it? I would say yes, because these texts and what they contain are so vital to my life. If the ideas and literature encased in ancient languages are existentially meaningful to a student, the student will find the wherewithal and resilience to learn an ancient language with competence.

Those who study Classics without the benefit of Latin and Greek will be forever beholden to translators—they will be dependent on the intellectual labor and ability of others.

Here’s to classics majors, innocent and guilty, fictional and real. Their sins were scarlet, but their books were read. And they know: Forsan et haec olim meminisse juvabit.

•••

Our poetry selection for this week is “Bad Timing,” by Scott McConnaha. Readers can view all of America’s published poems here.

Other recent Catholic Book Club columns:

Happy reading!

James T. Keane

James T. Keane is a Senior Editor at America.