The Little Friend by Donna Tartt

After having spent forever wondering how best to start writing my thoughts about a book that I enjoyed so much and am so excited about, yet having procrastinated to review, I finally decided not to overthink it anymore. It's been about a week since I finished reading The Little Friend, and I have spent quite a bit of time since then gathering all the things I had underlined in it and all my notes from the margins. This collection ended up being way larger in volume than I had anticipated; which is all for the best, because I hope I don't forget this book and just how it felt to read it!

The Little Friend is a revenge story with a classic Donna Tartt-esque twist. 12 year old Harriet Cleve Dufresnes sets out to kill Danny Ratliff, to avenge her brother Robin's murder. Set in the small town of Alexandria, Mississippi, Harriet's plan unfolds over the course of her summer break from school, at the end of which so many lives, including ofcourse, Harriet's, are changed forever. 

It's been over a decade since Robin died, and nobody knows who did it or why. The Cleves have barely been able to pull themselves together, Harriet's mother now a mere shell of the person she was. The trail's already frigid, when Harriet decides to take matters into her own hands. Inspired by the feats of her heroes -- Harry Houdini, explorer Captain Scott, and Sherlock Holmes, and having on good authority (her beloved housekeeper Ida's) that Danny Ratliff is the one responsible, she starts hatching a plan to kill Danny. Deliver justice.

Like what readers would expect from the rich worlds of Donna Tartt, The Little Friend is dense with vivid descriptions of settings and sensations: where something happens; how something looks and feels. Some of my favourite passages in the book have been descriptions of various places around town seen through Harriet's lens. Her great aunt Libby's bedroom: "a friendly underwater kingdom", a place of her babyhood, a place of comfort and soft things. The same attachment that she feels towards Libby is mirrored in her fondness of the room, and how after Libby's death, the house goes from being Harriet's sweet refuge to a cold, haunting emptiness, silent furniture and carpets that once bristled with enchantment. The toolshed in Harriet's backyard where she and Hely make their secret plans -- the clitter-clatter of objects, the cobwebs and shadows, rods of sunlights making their way down through the riddled ceiling -- the perfect spot for "secret excitement". And the landscape of Alexandria itself, not the cozy small town from a dream, but hot and stifling, shadeless with deforestation, environmental disregard, and putrid with snakes aplenty! Donna Tartt's Alexandria is rife with these snakes and their odours, around yards and lakes, woods and stinking mud-flats in the heat. The river coils around the town, a giant snake itself!

In each of the seven chapters, Harriet goes a few steps forward, a few steps back, and a few in circles, but ultimately marching closer to her singular goal with a resolute confidence. And her companion, other than Hely for the most part, is her reckless optimism. Snake-hunting through the woods, following criminals and drug dealers into their lairs, trespassing into worlds of danger and escaping more near death scenarios than she (or we as readers) planned for -- she is fuelled by her precocious conviction. The pitfalls along the way do not deter her. And this, to me, is the terrible paradox. Because the final few pages of the book are ravaging, like a storm, that tear down her conviction into doubt and regret. In an ending very reminiscent of The Goldfinch, the paramount unshakeable belief begins to crack, and just like that, Harriet's world comes crashing down around her. 

The Little Friend is as much a novel about Harriet's loneliness as it is about her plan. Beneath her armour of books and games and clever little things, she is a product of domestic neglect. She broods and wanders, with her house slumbering unbothered around her. She finds her comfort in the warm affections of the housekeeper. Add to this the relentless need of wanting to live up to the memory of a dead sibling, always feeling like the adults love him more. Several times, she mentions wanting to tune out conversations with her mother, because she knows everything usually lapses into a big uncomfortable ... nothingness. In her mountainous grief over her son, Charlotte has forgotten her daughters. And can we blame her, really? So the girls are on their own. Harriet is on her own. Against this background of a tattering household is Ida Rhew's undisputed place as the center of Harriet's world. Ida is the only parental presence in Harriet's life; she's the one who keeps the roof of the Dufresnes house from falling over all their heads. Ida's eventual departure feels like Harriet's life taking a sharp turn towards an even darker loneliness. 

The Little Friend is, without being a book about race, a testimony to the workings of the class divide that permeates the town, where the blacks are the maids, housekeepers, gardeners, doing odd jobs in rich white houses to make ends meet. It is about the dark underbelly of a small town. The Ratliffs and Odums, drug dealers, murderous brotherhoods; people who inflict hurt because they can, and because they don't know better. It is about the unpredictable consequences of our thoughts and actions, and the unpredictable paths our lives can take. 

I thoroughly enjoyed reading this novel (if it wasn't easy to make out from all of this above), and am disappointed only that there aren't any more of Donna Tartt's books yet that I can read for the first time. And so, I'm off to pick up my copy of The Secret History, which truthfully, I wasn't very taken with when I read it a few years ago. But in the wake of The Little Friend I have decided to pick it up again. :)