A Nursery Rhyme Of Vengeance

By James Poniewozik

Harriet Cleve Dufresnes, the 12-year-old heroine of Donna Tartt's The Little Friend, is a bookish girl in small-town Mississippi in the early '70s. So was Tartt. Harriet has dark bobbed hair and an intense stare that unnerves other children and even grownups. Look at Tartt's photo, and compare for yourself. And--not unlike an author gestating a Gothic suspense novel--Harriet is patiently hatching a terrible and ominous plan.

For Tartt, "patiently" is the operative word. As the precocious 28-year-old author of 1992's The Secret History, about a murder by a clique of college intellectuals, she won rave reviews, media adulation and a welcome-wagon of advance and movie-rights money. Then she withdrew to complete a novel that was to be finished in a few years, then a few more years. The lit-world gossips nattered: Was she a one-hit wonder? In hiding? Sophomore-slumped?

If so, every sophomore should slump this well. The Little Friend (Knopf; 555 pages) is a sprawling story of vengeance, with few wasted words, told in a rich, controlled voice that can come only from long effort, which doesn't show ostentatiously on the page. Like History, it's a murder mystery in which the mystery is secondary. Twelve years before the novel begins, Harriet's 9-year-old brother Robin was found hanged in the backyard. Harriet's family--social pillars who have lost their wealth but not their hauteur--have not healed well. Her father has abandoned the family; her mother has checked out emotionally, leaving Harriet's rearing to the maid and the Alexandria, Miss., library, whose blackhearted adventure tales--Stevenson's pirates, Kipling's cobras--she reads greedily. She also loves Bible stories, for their morbid, operatic horror; in her yard, she stages Passion plays, in which she stars as Jesus, serving Ritz crackers and grape Fanta as the Last Supper and acting out Christ's capture at Gethsemane beneath the tree where Robin was hanged.

Robin hovers over Harriet and her older sister like a saint and weighs on them like an anvil: a stained-glass window in their church, dedicated to him, depicts Jesus talking to "a red-haired boy in a baseball cap who bore an unmistakable resemblance to Robin." One summer, Harriet sets out to "solve" his murder. She concludes--through an arbitrary and disastrous hunch--that he was hanged by his playmate Danny Ratliff, now 20, a drug dealer from a trailer-trash family. The penalty: she will kill Danny by getting a poisonous snake to bite him.

What follows is an acute examination of amateur justice and its unintended results. If Friend suffers by comparison to History, it is in its familiar eccentric aunts and faded gentry, who infest Southern literature like kudzu. But Harriet is an original. While grownups like Michael Chabon are moonlighting as kids' writers, Tartt has written a grownup book that captures the dark, Lord of the Flies side of childhood and classic children's literature. Harriet is a child, not a pint-size adult or supergirl. (She's Harriet, not Harriet the Spy.) She is smart but not wise, naive but not innocent, a stubborn moral absolutist who acts not out of Harry Potter bravery but out of love, prejudice and ignorance of the consequences of her actions. In contrast, her best friend and accomplice, Hely, a dim, happy, "normal" boy who loves James Bond and cartoons, treats the mission like a spy game (he's Tom Sawyer to Harriet's Huck) until too late.

Along the way, Tartt tells the parallel story of the Ratliff family (Danny proves to be a pitiable sad sack, terrorized by his elder brother). The connections between the Ratliffs and Harriet's family make a kind of class history of the white South from Jefferson Davis to Lynyrd Skynyrd. If Tartt's tone softens a bit at the end, her unsentimental clarity avoids the feel-good coming-of-age-tale pitfalls that irritate Harriet. "She did not care for children's books in which the children grew up," Tartt writes, "as what 'growing up' entailed (in life as in books) was a swift and inexplicable dwindling of character." No such dwindling here. The Little Friend is a child's story that Harriet herself could love.