Book Review: The Little Friend by Donna Tartt (20 Books of Summer)

This book is really long. I’ve read both The Goldfinch and The Secret History by Donna Tartt before and enjoyed them both and neither are particularly short books. But The Little Friend felt long. I started it on audio and had to renew it once and then switched to a hard copy because I figured I could read faster than I could listen and I just wanted to get it done.

The book starts on the day that 9-year-old Robin Dufresne is murdered. In the middle of the hustle and bustle of a busy Mother’s Day, his body is found hung from a tree in his own front yard. This tragedy has repercussions for the entire community, particularly his immediate family. Jumping forward to the main timeline of the novel, Robin’s younger sisters – the only witnesses to the murder – are now teenagers and the baby, Harriet, is on the brink of teenagehood. Neither sister remembers the murder but both would clearly have benefitted from some therapy in its aftermath. But this is the South in the 1970s (I think? I wasn’t entirely clear on the timeline) and so instead no one really talks about Robin much. Their parents are still married but live apart and the girls live with their mother who has sunk into a deep depression. It is their grandmother and her three sisters and their Black housekeeper, Ida, who mostly take care of them.

In the summer that Harriet is twelve, she decides she’s going to solve her brother’s murder and she and her best friend, Hely, embark on a haphazard quest to find justice. So far, so good. Tartt spends a lot of time establishing characters – from Harriet and Hely to Harriet’s older sister Alison and Harriet’s grandmother Edie, to more secondary characters like Hely’s older brother or Mr Dial who owns the secondhand car dealership. There are a lot of characters.

Which is perhaps part of the problem. Tartt spends so much time developing the setting and the characters that I was halfway into the book and realized I didn’t really know what it was about. What’s the plot? What’s the driving question? Because it was kind of about Robin’s murder but that never felt particularly urgent. Is it a coming of age story about Harriet? Is it about the social class differences and struggles in the American South? Is it a racial issue? I’m still not entirely sure.

As Harriet works to enact her revenge, we learn more about the family that she has pinned the blame on. This was interesting too as they are living parallel to Robin and Harriet’s family but entirely different lives, showcasing a seedier underbelly to this seemingly genteel town. But Tartt relies too heavily on coincidence to bring Harriet into their hemisphere. For example, Harriet goes looking for a poisonous snake to kill the person she believes murdered her brother. Meanwhile, it just so happens that he is already in contact with someone who has a truck full of poisonous snakes. Why are there so many snakes??? I couldn’t come up with one poisonous snake right now if I tried!

The coincidences simply mount up as the book ramps up to the ending, bringing key characters into the same places at the same time simply by happenstance. How small is this town? And then we get to the end of the book and it just…ends. And there’s nothing that drives me crazier than a book that makes you read 500 pages without offering a satisfying conclusion.

Having read more of Tartt’s works, I don’t want to come down on her too hard. She’s a talented writer and I’ll definitely read more of her in the future. This isn’t the book I’ll be pushing into people’s hands though.