Review

The Little Friend

By Donna Tartt

Published by Bloomsbury

Reviewed by Peter Porter

Readers of American fiction know that there are a myriad different worlds, many of them grotesque and impoverished, behind the imageof the Super Power which bestrides our television screens. The rest of the world is indebted to American writers for their admirably fearless portrayal of life far from Friends, Frasier and Hollywood's variegated menu of Shock and Awe. Out there, hardly concerned with NASDAQ and The New American Order, are the Rust belt, New Yorl Psychodrama and, especially, the Deep South - social stratas which cry out Dislocation! Dislocation!

Donna Tartt's The Little Friend is a brilliant addition to Southern novel-making, a tradition going back two centuries and brought into recent focus by authors such as William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, Flannery O'Connor, Carson McCullers and Tennessee Williams. Against a backdrop of stately but decrepit ante-bellum survival, life is now lived in echoes of elswhere, of the modern America of enterprise and hope. Here, all is still faded glory of old homesteads, wrecked cotton mills, Baptist chapels and the remnants of White Supremacy, the air filled with magnolia and death.

Donna Tartt's story is centred on Alexandria, an old cotton town in Mississippi whose nearest metropolis is Nashville Tennessee. Two families, who would naturally have little to do with each other, are brought into tragic collision. This is an extravagantly plotted novel of near-Dickensian reliance on coincidence and adjacence, but the plot is predominantly a wire on which to hang marvellously maintained tableaux of contemporary Southern life. The Cleves (married into the Dufresnes) are decayed gentry and the Ratliffs criminal White Trash. Pivot of the action is Harriet Cleve Dufresnes, pre-pubescent granddaughter of Edie, scion of an establishment judge and imperious last remnant of Southern decorum. Harriet's brother Robin has been mysteriously murdered, and it gradually dawns on Harriet that the killer is Danny Ratliff, a perpetually doped-up ex-schoolfellow of Robin's. For more than 500 pages, Harriet and her adoring ally, Hely Hull, an all-American cheerleader and trombonist in the School Band, contrive elaborate and farcical traps to destroy Danny. That all this conspiracy is ludicrous does nothing to lessen the neurotic tension pervading their childhood games.

The Ratliffs are a serious gloss on comic weirdos such as TV's The Munsters. Gumm, immortal Granny, looks after surviving grandsons Farish, Danny, Eugene and Curtis, a retarded infant radiating inappropriate love. The rest of the family is dead or in gaol. Farish brews up drugs to sell; Danny, ever in search of 'a bump', drives him about. Eugene is a preacher, which enables Tartt to introduce hyperboles of invention describing the practice of testifying to the presence of God by handling poisonous snakes. Not for a moment do these extravagantly comic scenes detract from the horror underlying them.

Harriet's family lives under the auspices of the Baptist Church. Harriet is addicted to English heroes - Scott of the Antarctic, and Mowgli of The Jungle Book. She also idolises Harry Houdini, the escapologist, and trains hard at holding her breath underwater. This skill becomes important at the book's denouement which, it must be said, is not wholly convincing. Its melodrama unfortunately expels Tartt's prevailing irony. However, the character of Harriet is a tour-de-force of psychological personality-building. Over everything and everyone looms the worldly decay of Alexandria, whose turbid river runs through the action like a poisonous vein.

Donna Tartt is a remarkable writer at each end of the spectrum - darkly Gothic and sharply comic. Her description of a man drowning includes this passage: 'Accusatory, helpless, the eyes of a guillotined head held up before the mob … ' and of carpet baggers: 'Companionable Judases in Florschein shoes offering girlie magazines and nips of whiskey…' She has worked long and hard to create a world seemingly lit by hellfire. Her book holds the attention with as glittering an eye as The Ancient Mariner's. Reading it is truly a haunting experience.

Peter Porter is a full-time poet and attentive reader of novels and stories. Winner of the 2002 Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry and The Forward prize for Poetry the same year, his recent publications include Collected Poems, 1961 - 1999 (OUP 1999) and Max is Missing (Picador, 2001). He is also a literary journalist and broadcaster of Australian origin.

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