The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Donna Tartt · a novel · Alfred A. Knopf, New York, September 1992 · scored on the novel as published, Prologue, Book I, Book II and Epilogue under an epigraph from Plato, read from knowledge on Tartt’s English
Mode
The inverted crime novel made into tragedy: the murder told in the first sentence, the question how and why, and then what it does to those who did it
Mythos
The Bacchae performed, not cited; the scapegoat expelled so that the city may go on; the corrupting master and the god who departs; the outsider admitted to the mysteries
Phase
Hampden College in Vermont across one academic year in the 1980s, with a funeral in Connecticut and an epilogue some years on
Presentation
Fiction; a first-person retrospective narration by Richard Papen throughout, in a Prologue, two books of comparable length divided by the murder, and an Epilogue
Register
Cultivated, cool and slightly ornamental: a calm that makes the dread colder, with social comedy laid across the second book
Scale
One circle in one college in one year, a few houses and rooms, with the ordinary world pressing in at its edges
Governing Proposition
Richard Papen, from Plano, California, comes to Hampden College in Vermont, lies about his origins, and is admitted to a closed class of five students who read Greek with a teacher named Julian. A rite performed on the model of the Bacchae kills a farmer; a classmate, Bunny Corcoran, knows it and becomes a danger; the others kill him at a ravine in a late spring snow. The book tells the murder in its first sentence and spends its length on how it came and what it did. Its wager is that a cult of beauty held without the moral law turns, with little resistance, into a licence to kill for reasons of convenience, that the price is paid in the ordinary world, and that a reader drawn by the telling shares the narrator’s longing for what destroyed his friends.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The novel opens on its end. “The snow in the mountains was melting and Bunny had been dead for several weeks before we came to understand the gravity of our situation”: the first sentence of the Prologue announces the death of Bunny Corcoran, and the narrator, Richard Papen, tells it with a calm that is colder than alarm would be.
The choice governs everything after it. A reader who knows that a classmate will be killed by his friends does not read for who or whether, but for how and why, and for what the killing does to those who did it. The inverted detective story is an old form; here it is put to the service of a long literary novel, and the suspense it leaves is of a stranger kind, the reader’s own fascination with a circle he already knows to be murderous.
The voice is retrospective, cultivated and wistful, the voice of a man who still longs for what destroyed his friends. It is Richard’s character and his alibi at once. Over the whole stands an epigraph from Plato’s Republic, and its phrase, “the education of our heroes”, names with irony the pattern the book will follow.
Movement II
Richard comes from Plano, California, to Hampden College, a small liberal-arts college in Vermont. To enter the closed class in Greek that a teacher named Julian keeps with five students, he lies about his origins. He is complicit from the first: before there is a crime, there is a falsified self admitted to a circle on false terms.
The circle is clever, strange and withdrawn. Henry and Francis have old money; Bunny lives in genteel poverty on borrowed funds; the twins hold to each other. In Julian’s flower-filled room the seminar turns to the Dionysian and to the loss of self, and the doctrine is given in three words, “Beauty is terror”. The students have been taught, in effect, that the moral law is for others, and the elevation of their language is already a way of not seeing what they are about to do.
Richard’s own flaw, as he states it, is “a morbid longing for the picturesque at all costs”. It is the flaw of the narrator and the temptation of the reader, and the book’s elegance shares it. Before he is admitted to the secret, he spends a winter alone in an unheated warehouse and comes near death in the cold: an exile before the mysteries, and the strongest case in Book I of an episode that earns less than its length.
Movement III
The book’s central event happens off the page, and the reader learns of it only late, through Henry’s account: the students performed a rite on the model of the Bacchae, and the rite worked. They lost themselves, and in the course of it a farmer was killed, torn as Pentheus is torn in Euripides. The myth is not cited here but performed, and it kills a man.
Withholding the bacchanal and telling it late at second hand keeps its awe; it also makes Richard’s knowledge of it one of the book’s open questions. What follows from it is the plot’s engine. Bunny, who knows, becomes a danger: he talks without end of a spring trip to Italy he cannot stop talking about, he lets fall half-confessions, and the group’s fear of him grows by accumulation.
Here the book’s disclosure takes form. Bunny is not hated; he is tiresome and dangerous, and the reason to kill him is social convenience. Henry plans it. The circle that had sought the loss of self in a rite now seeks the loss of a person for its own safety, and its high language covers the turn.
Movement IV
Book I ends with the murder at the ravine, in a late spring snowfall. Bunny falls backward with something like surprise. It is the book’s summit of terror, and it arrives not as a turn of melodrama but as the group’s logic carried through. The scapegoat pattern begins: the city expels the pharmakos so that it may go on.
Book II is the aftermath, and the aftermath is the subject. The ordinary world returns: the police and the press, the funeral weekend with the Corcoran family in Connecticut, Bunny’s father and the family drawn with comic exactness, Judy Poovey and the campus parties. The comedy is the world the students believed they had left, coming back to them, and it does not understand or forgive.
The second book is also where the novel slackens. Drink and pills blur the narrative as well as the characters, and some of the comedy runs on its own energy rather than the book’s law. Its form is the conventional novel of aftermath and investigation, and parts of it could go with a loss of length rather than of sense; but the long poisoning of those who killed is what the book was built to show, and the shape of hubris and nemesis holds.
Movement V
Julian learns the truth from Bunny’s letter and simply leaves. The teacher who preached the loss of self disowns its consequences with a single departure: the god withdraws, and the question whether his flight is a judgment or a cowardice is left open. It is as much a convenience of the plot as a consequence of the law, and it is the book’s most telling picture of authority that will not answer for what it taught.
The pollution returns on the circle. The last scene is in a hotel room, with a gun: Richard is wounded, and Henry, who planned the murder, dies by his own hand. He is the tragic protagonist the narrator could not be. The Epilogue, some years on, disposes of the survivors’ fates, more tidily than what came before.
What remains is the voice. Richard has learned what he tells, but he tells it as a man not remade by it, and the older narrator rarely judges the younger. The book diagnoses the longing for the picturesque and, in its own elegance, still partly shares it; that is its limit, and it is also why the reader, who has been drawn the whole way by the telling, finds the flaw to be his own.
Act III · The Twelve
The spine is required and tightly made. The Greek class must be closed and strange, so that a reader can believe five students and a teacher withdrawn from the moral world. The bacchanal must happen, since it kills the farmer and gives Bunny his hold. Bunny’s menace, through the spring trip to Italy he cannot stop talking about and his half-confessions, must be built at length, so that the murder at the ravine arrives as the group’s logic and not as a turn of melodrama. Book II must exist, because the book’s subject is what the murder does to those who did it. The subtractive test finds the licence of that second book: the funeral weekend, the comedy of police and press, Judy Poovey and the parties, the long haze of drink and pills, much of it good and some of it removable without loss. In Book I, Richard’s winter in the unheated warehouse earns less than its length.
Score: 7.6 / 10
The disclosure can be stated, and it holds. A cult of beauty, held by clever young people taught that the moral law is for others, turns without much resistance into a licence to kill, and the killing is done for social convenience, not passion: Bunny dies because he is tiresome and dangerous, not because anyone hates him. The book sees how the group hides from itself what it does by keeping its language high, and how a teacher who preaches the loss of self can disown its consequences by leaving. The second disclosure is the outsider’s: Richard lies to enter the circle and is complicit from the first, and his flaw, by his own account, is “a morbid longing for the picturesque at all costs”, which is the reader’s temptation too. What holds the axis below eight is that the finding is diagnosed more than earned: the narrator states what he learned rather than being changed by it, and the finding about aestheticism and murder was old when Dostoevsky, Gide and the Leopold and Loeb case gave it form.
Score: 7.9 / 10
Elevation comes, in a cold register. The first sentence, “The snow in the mountains was melting and Bunny had been dead for several weeks before we came to understand the gravity of our situation”, sets a dreadful calm that the book sustains. The murder at the ravine, in a late spring snowfall, Bunny falling backward with something like surprise, is its summit of terror. Julian’s seminar on the Dionysian, with its “Beauty is terror”, states the sublime the book seeks, and the bacchanal, told after the fact, keeps its awe by being withheld. Richard near death in the frozen warehouse, and the last scene in the hotel room, with the gun, Richard wounded and Henry’s suicide, are real heights. What holds the axis below eight is frequency and register: long stretches of Book II are social comedy and nervous suspense, the narrator’s manner is cool and slightly ornamental, and the book reaches the sublime it describes less often than it names it.
Score: 7.9 / 10
Myth is built here, and built into the plot. The Bacchae is not an allusion but a rite the students perform, and the rite works: they lose themselves, and a man dies, torn as Pentheus is torn. The second killing makes Bunny a pharmakos, the scapegoat the city expels so that it may go on, and the group’s survival afterwards follows the pattern exactly, until the pollution returns on them. Julian is the corrupting master, a Socrates whose pupils become his Alcibiades, and his withdrawal is the departure of the god. The twins’ bond carries the old taboo; Henry, who plans the murder and dies by his own hand, is the tragic protagonist the narrator could not be. Richard is the newcomer from the profane world, Plano, admitted to the mysteries, and the epigraph from Plato, “the education of our heroes”, names the pattern with irony. What holds the axis below the gate is unevenness: Francis and Charles bear less of the weight than their roles promise, Julian is drawn more as an aura than a figure, and some of the myth works through seminar talk rather than action.
Score: 8.3 / 10
The inheritance is plain and the book owns it: Crime and Punishment, the murder by a theory of exception; Brideshead Revisited, the middle-class narrator seduced by a gilded circle; the campus novel; the inverted detective story, in which the murderer is known from the start and the question is how and why; and Euripides himself. The turn is in the fusion. A literary novel of classical learning, in a late-Jamesian register, was put to the uses of the suspense novel, at great length, in 1992, when the American literary novel of the moment was minimalist or postmodern and the campus novel was satire. For a first novel of over five hundred pages that was a real wager, and it was placed. What holds the axis in the middle sevens is that the forms are inherited whole: the inverted whodunit is old, the seduction by a circle is old, and what is new is the scale and conviction of the joining, not a reorganisation of any one part.
Score: 7.6 / 10
The form carries the knowledge. The murder told in the first sentence turns a mystery into a study of complicity: the reader, knowing the end, watches the circle close, and the suspense becomes his own fascination with a group he knows to be murderous, which is the narrator’s flaw made the reader’s experience. The first-person retrospect, cultivated, wistful and evasive, is Richard’s character and his alibi; he narrates as a man who still longs for what destroyed his friends, and the elegance of the telling is itself the longing for the picturesque. The two books are the argument: Book I the approach to the act, Book II its long poisoning, the tragic shape of hubris and nemesis made into the novel’s architecture. What holds the axis off the top is that the second book’s form is the conventional aftermath and investigation novel, which could be told otherwise without much loss, and that the older narrator rarely judges or contradicts the younger, so the frame is not used as fully as it allows.
Score: 8.2 / 10
Evidence first: thirty-four years of reading, and the book has kept yielding to a very large public of re-readers. The open questions are real. How far is Richard reliable, how much does he hide of his own part, and what did he know of the bacchanal? How guilty is Julian, and is his flight a judgment or a cowardice? What was the twins’ relation, and what did Henry want with Camilla? Was Bunny the vulgar threat the narrator draws, or the one honest person among them? The second reading, knowing the end, changes the first book: every elevated phrase in the seminar reads as a step toward the ravine. Scholarship exists and is moderate; the book is studied as a campus novel, as a reworking of Greek tragedy and as the origin of a popular mode. What holds the axis below eight is that much of its depth is atmosphere that does not deepen on return, and its open questions are of character and fact more than of meaning.
Score: 7.8 / 10
The field is the American novel in English of the 1990s, with the campus novel and the literary thriller inside it. The intrinsic force is real and bounded: the book showed that the literary novel could take back the pleasures of plot and suspense without condescension, that classical learning and an elevated style could be the stuff of a bestseller, and that the campus novel could be tragedy rather than satire. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the book is the acknowledged source of what readers now call dark academia, a mode with its own shelf, and later novels of that mode take it as their model, many of them lesser books. What holds the axis below eight is the kind of the reach: it lies in a popular mode more than in the form of the novel; the major turns of the decade’s fiction were made elsewhere; and sales and a revived readership online are presence, not redirection.
Score: 7.9 / 10
The highest of the twelve. Survival is demonstrated over thirty-four years and is weighed as thirty-four years. The text survives whole, as published, and has been in print throughout, in many translations. Its presence is continuous and of the widest kind for a literary novel of its decade: read through the 1990s and 2000s, taught in some courses, and revived from about the late 2010s by a large young readership that took it as the foundation of a mode. The surface is fixed to its moment in small things, the 1980s, no telephones in the students’ rooms, a Vermont college before computers, but that fixity is the period setting of a book that never depended on it. With the widest presence the figure takes the upper end of the step for its age and no more, since fame and sales earn at most a tenth.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Judged on Tartt’s English, the command is real and load-bearing. The murder is planted in the first sentence and the suspense is nonetheless sustained for five hundred pages; Bunny’s menace is built by accumulation; the bacchanal is withheld and told late at second hand, which is the right choice; the set pieces, the ravine, the warehouse, the funeral, the hotel, are each well made; and a voice is held from first to last, lucid, cultivated and controlled. The secondary figures, Bunny above all, his father and the Corcoran family, Judy Poovey, are drawn with comic exactness. Three charges hold the axis below the top. Length: Book II slackens, and the drink and pills blur the narrative as well as the characters. Manner: the prose is at times ornamental, a register laid over scenes that need sharper sentences, and Richard is a thin presence at the centre of his own book. Contrivance: the ending in the hotel and the Epilogue’s dispatch of fates are tidier than what came before.
Score: 8.3 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: Julian’s seminar on the Dionysian, in his flower-filled room, and the comic funeral of Bunny in Connecticut, with its family and its reporters; or the snowbound warehouse in Book I and the hotel room at the end. One law governs them. Beauty sought without the moral law claims its price, and the claim is paid in the ordinary world, which neither understands nor forgives. The comedy is that world, which the students believed they had left, coming back; the warehouse is Richard’s exile before admission, the hotel his last share of the expulsion. The range is wide, from campus satire to tragedy, and it is held in one voice. What holds the axis near eight is that Julian’s exit is a convenience as much as a consequence, that the comedy of Book II sometimes runs on its own energy rather than the law’s, and that the tone wavers where suspense, satire and tragedy meet.
Score: 8.1 / 10
The lowest of the twelve. Several orders are joined through one circle. Consciousness, in Richard’s longing and concealment. Class and money, the book’s most exact order: Richard’s lie about his family, Bunny’s genteel poverty and borrowed money, the old wealth of Henry and Francis. Education and its authority, in Julian and the college. The family, in Richard’s cold parents, the Corcorans and the twins. Sexuality and taboo, in Francis and in the twins. The sacred, in the Dionysian rite. The law, in the police and the press. They are integrated, not listed: each is a stage on which the circle’s separation from the world is tested. What holds the axis in the middle sevens is a narrowness chosen by design: one college, one year, a few houses; history and the state are absent, labour is barely present, and the book holds its orders inside a closed room.
Score: 7.5 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.0 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Imperishable at 8.6, then The Archetypal Deep and The Made at 8.3, and The Living Form at 8.2. Thirty-four years whole and in print, with a presence of the widest kind for a literary novel of its decade and a second life among young readers; the Bacchae performed and the scapegoat pattern carried through the whole second half; a design in which the murder is told first and the suspense still holds for five hundred pages; and a form that makes the narrator’s longing the reader’s experience.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 7.5: one college, one year and a few houses, with history and the state absent and labour barely present. Then The Inevitable and The Swerve at 7.6: a second book longer than its argument needs, with removable comedy and a haze of drink and pills; and inherited forms, the inverted crime novel, the seduction by a circle and the campus novel, joined at new scale rather than reorganised. Six of the twelve axes stand below eight, and the mean, at 7.975, rounds to the foot of the tier.
The Necessity Cap clears at The Inevitable 7.6 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears: The Living Form 8.2, The Made 8.3 and The Inner Law 8.1, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet on four axes: The Imperishable 8.6 clears the bar of 8.5, but The Archetypal Deep 8.3 falls two tenths short, its myth built but carried unevenly and partly through seminar talk; The Unconcealment 7.9 falls six tenths short, its finding about aestheticism and murder old and stated more than suffered; Pressure on Tradition 7.9 six tenths, its reach in a popular mode rather than in the form of the novel; and The Swerve 7.6 nine tenths, its forms inherited whole. The Universal Minimum is met, the lowest gated axes being The Inevitable and The Swerve at 7.6. The Megethos Floor is met: The Encompassed 7.5 against 6.0. Four of the five summit conditions are met. The aggregate stands at 8.0, below 9.0 in any case, and the novel is placed in the Canonical tier on its standing, at its foot.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Donna Tartt’s The Secret History, her first novel, published by Alfred A. Knopf, New York, in September 1992. It is scored as the novel as published, a Prologue, Book I, Book II and an Epilogue under an epigraph from Plato’s Republic, on Tartt’s English, with no translation between. The book is in copyright and no text of it was in hand; nothing was measured on a text. The plot, the six students and their teacher, the structure, the set pieces and the ending are known closely, the paragraph-level prose less exactly; the only sentences quoted are the first sentence, the words “Beauty is terror”, Richard’s “a morbid longing for the picturesque at all costs” and the epigraph’s “the education of our heroes”. Its sources and neighbours are named for comparison: Euripides’ The Bacchae (9.2) and Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment (9.3), far above it on every axis; Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho and Martin Amis’s Time’s Arrow, both at 8.2, the nearest books in kind and year, above it; Robertson Davies’s Fifth Business (7.6), a mythic novel of guilt told in retrospect, below it; and, on other desks, Oldboy (7.9) and Get Out (7.9), genre works built on tragedy and on a closed and murderous circle, beside it. Matters that could not be verified, among them the size of the first printing, the page and word counts, the number of chapters in each book, the number of translations and the particular later novels said to answer it, are not given.