Murder Midst The Ferns

By Martha Duffy

TITLE: THE SECRET HISTORY

AUTHOR: DONNA TARTT

PUBLISHER: KNOPF; 524 PAGES; $23

THE BOTTOM LINE: The novel that has everything: chills, thrills, campus scandals, literary jokes.

What are you doing up here? said Bunny, surprised, when he found the four of us waiting for him.

Why, looking for new ferns, said Henry.

Then, with Henry leading the ambush, Bunny's buddies push him down to his death in a ravine. A quick look round for dropped keys or glasses. "Everybody got everything?"

This little shocker is just the beginning of a long, ambitious first novel by a young Mississippian. The publisher has ordered up a 75,000-copy first printing. Director Alan Pakula (Klute, All the President's Men) has bought it for the movies. What Donna Tartt has attempted -- and largely brought off -- is a challenging combination of a mystery (will they get caught or won't they?), an exploration of evil, both banal and bizarre, and a generous slice of the world as seen by the author, a brainy graduate of Bennington who has mastered Greek and English literature and doesn't care who knows it. It all adds up to confidence verging on bravura.

The little band of murderous fern seekers are students at Hampden, a small, very liberal arts college in Vermont. Acute, cerebral and tasteful to a fault, the group have become acolytes of an eccentric Greek scholar who demands that what few pupils he takes study only his curriculum. There is Henry, rich, seductive, depraved; Francis, a homosexual with a very convenient house in the nearby hills; Athena-like Camilla and her twin Charles. Charles drinks too much, but then they all do, including Bunny, the feckless, unreliable odd man out.

This cabal is crashed by the narrator, Richard Papen, a penniless transfer student who had taken some Greek. He is as close as the book comes to an objective center, but the device gets shaky because Richard is a facile, silly liar, boasting about an imaginary family oil well. He will do anything to be accepted by these sophisticates. Anything.

What he gradually learns is that four of the five, excluding Bunny, have already killed, in the course of what they are pleased to call a Greek bacchanal. A luckless farmer strayed into the path of their late-night revels, and, chitons aflap, fueled by booze and drugs, they butchered him. For Charles it was a doomed awakening of conscience. For Henry it was a revelation of quite another sort. Before, he explains to the perpetually horrified Richard, he "lived too much in the mind." After, "I know that I can do anything that I want."

Well, there is one necessity on Henry's agenda. Bunny -- the unserious one, the blabbermouth, the buffoon -- begins to suspect the quartet of the killing in the field. In general Tartt shows a superior sense of pace, playing off her red herrings and foreshadowings like an old hand at the suspense game. The book's only lag occurs in her needlessly elaborate effort to turn Bunny from a likable pest into someone obnoxious enough for Richard to want to kill (for the others, fear of detection is enough). The cause of Bunny's mounting hysteria, of course, is simple: he is going from suspicion to terror.

The Secret History offers the zest of the author's energy and the pleasure of seeing a young mind tackle classic forms. Is Vermont, or a microcollege, a stand-in for the author's native South? No, the shaggy, druggy ways of small schools around the country are sharply, and often humorously, captured here. But in its large-scale concept and its shell-game view of plotting, The Secret History distinctly evokes the Southern tradition.