R.S. Benedict
J.R., welcome to the right good book club for this month’s episode, we are joined once again by Canadian correspondent J.R. To talk about Donna Tartt massive novel, The Secret History. So let’s dive into some dark academia. Oh, te Bucha. All right, so thank you for agreeing to read this gigantic book. When, when I picked it, I forgot how fucking huge it was. It is. It is a big boy. It is a big beefy boy of a book. It is a tome. It is a it is a brick. It is the size of a little and Scott just nothing, is
J.R. Bolt
it? It’s like almost 800 pages or something, yeah.
R.S. Benedict
But what’s remarkable is it doesn’t feel like it drags. It doesn’t feel like there’s padding somehow. Yeah, it’s quite
J.R. Bolt
propulsive. It moves at a very steady clip and from the first page too. Yeah, there’s
R.S. Benedict
never something where I’m reading it and I’m thinking, this could have been cut. This should have been cut everything. Well, necessary. There
J.R. Bolt
are some things that I think could have been cut, but not, not whole scenes, just more, getting up to get a glass of water, sitting down to drink the water, looking out the window, looking away from the window, that sort of thing. But because there is a lot of that, but yeah, no slight on donut art for setting her scene. Yeah,
R.S. Benedict
yeah, just with extraordinary detail. I don’t know I love it. I, for me, I felt like it really brought it to life.
J.R. Bolt
Yeah, I really do love her as a pro stylist. Oh, yeah, her style is
R.S. Benedict
fantastic. It’s really sharp and it’s really funny.
J.R. Bolt
Yeah, she’s very witty and very dry. And you know, I was looking up reviews of this book from the early 90s when it came out, from 1992 93 very few of the big ticket reviewers The New York Times or whatever, they didn’t pick up any of the satire. I was reading a review by the Baffler, and they criticized the novel for being too self serious, having no sense of humor, having all the characters, you know, and tart herself, beat dour. I didn’t get it at all. I did not get that sense. I thought it was a very funny book. Yeah, it
R.S. Benedict
doesn’t, I guess it doesn’t wink at the camera, so to
J.R. Bolt
speak. Yeah, it’s very,
R.S. Benedict
just, like, frankly, extremely funny, just how completely fucking bananas these characters are. Like, there’s a moment where one of the major characters is revealed to genuinely believe in the theory of humorism, like the theory that there are four basic elements in the human body for humors.
J.R. Bolt
Yes, poor Charles doesn’t know anything, and just
R.S. Benedict
a lot of weird little absurdities like that, or Richard’s horror. One of the most, one of the greatest reactions of horror for him is when he is expected to eat something called a wacky cake. And this is after like, several murders have been committed, and like the MO The thing that he finds the most distasteful in this entire novel is like, there’s something called a wacky cake, which I’m not even going to describe. And I did look it up, and it’s also its alternate name. Is called a chocolate depression cake, which feels like it would make a very good alternate username for social media or something. Chocolate depression cake. It’s a good username, and it is a kind of cake made without eggs, because, you know, in the Great Depression, you couldn’t get those. Oh,
J.R. Bolt
well, that’s an interesting little retro thing as well, and we’ll talk about that, because there are so many rooted in the past elements of this book, right?
R.S. Benedict
So many. This book is very much about a group of college kids who try to return to tradition, Roman statue, abbeys, blah, blah, blah, with disastrous, absolutely disastrous results. But for those of you who haven’t read it, let’s just give you the basics. This book, published in the early 90s, takes place in the 80s, though it feels very out of time, and you’ll often just forget that it took takes place in the 80s. It is set in a liberal arts college, a small liberal arts college in Vermont, and it’s very clearly based on Bennington, where Donna tart went to school. Apparently, it’s a companion piece to the rules of attraction, whose author was a college buddy with Donna Tartt. And I’ve heard that the character called cloak Rayburn is actually based on him, Brett Easton Ellis, which is kind of funny considering, in this novel, he’s like a huge dirtbag drug dealer
J.R. Bolt
that tracks that sounds like a breed Easton Ellis. Thing to do. Yeah,
R.S. Benedict
that sounds perfect, but let’s dive into it. This, this novel, it’s really interesting, kind of structurally, in that it takes a lot of elements from thriller. From, like, trashy airport thrillers, and that it’s like this group of students, and there’s a conspiracy to commit murder, and then there’s another murder, and then there’s fighting and blah, blah, blah. And it even starts with this Prolog where we see the big murder that’s going to happen, which, again, is very much like an airport thriller novel, but at the same time, and it’s been disparaging, it’s set up
J.R. Bolt
like a movie, in that sense, like a you have a cold open, right, right,
R.S. Benedict
yeah, pre credit sequences, there
J.R. Bolt
is the big action moment,
R.S. Benedict
yeah, yeah. And then you lead up to it again. And so we know from the very beginning what’s going to happen, who’s going to die, and all that stuff. So it’s been disparagingly called a literary thriller, like, Oh, it’s just a thriller novel with literary style, okay, but you just described the perfect book, yeah? Like a beautifully written novel where murders happen. That’s all I want in a book that sounds great, yeah.
J.R. Bolt
I mean, the literary thriller is its own genre as well. That’s Umberto Eco, the Name of the Rose Fauci pendulum,
R.S. Benedict
yeah. But much more, I think it borrows from classical Greek literature, classical Greek theater that Prolog suits the classical tragedies in a big way in which these tragedies were based on well known folklore and legends. In other words, the ending is already a foregone conclusion. We know what’s going to happen in this story. There’s no there’s not really going to be a twist. We know exactly what’s going to happen, and that also fits the way that the Greeks believed 100% in fate, in predestination, in sooth saying. So we know bunny is going to die from the get go, just just in the way that Greek people watching the first play of the Oresteia know that Agamemnon is going to get stabbed to death in the bathtub. They know there’s no way it’s not going to happen. Cassandra knows that she’s going to get killed too, and she still walks into that house. There’s no way to undo it, and trying to fight against it is not going to make anything any better for you. So it’s kind of interesting in the way that Richard, our protagonist, Richard papen, operates through this. There’s there’s never any point in the novel where he feels like he’s really making a choice. There’s never a point in the novel where he’s like, Well, maybe I won’t help my friends murder somebody. It’s just, in retrospect, there’s a moment where he goes, Well, at this moment, I probably could have made some different choices, but it just didn’t occur to me. Yeah, his life was set on this path, and there were no branches on it, and that was it,
J.R. Bolt
yeah. And this sort of extends to the other characters too, or at least how Richard sees them. We get we had, like, not too detailed backstories, but we do find out about the backstories, the origin stories, I guess, of the characters like Henry, and we find out some weird things that, like, Henry’s interest in language only came from him being hit by a car and being bedridden for months and months where he started reading a lot and acquired this facility for language. And it doesn’t feel like he had much of a choice in the matter, either. So all the all the choices that, or all the events and happenstance that led them to being characters in this book, they felt sort of predestined as well. There’s not any hint of a person making any choice to become that way.
R.S. Benedict
Yeah. Or even in the end, in the Epilog, we have our boy, Francis, doesn’t really make the choice. Like, no, I’m gonna get out of this terrible arranged marriage. He’s just okay. I mean, his closest thing to choice is another very, very Greek thing, which is very, another Greek tragedy thing, which is an attempted suicide in the bathtub, I guess. But there’s never any idea of, yeah, I can escape this. Really, there was one attempted escape which was suicide, and the one that didn’t pan out, it’s just, well, like, I guess I’m going to marry this woman who sucks. That’s what I’m gonna do. That’s it. Our modern our closer to modern boy. Richard tries to urge him, Don’t fucking do this, dude. And he says, I can’t. I can’t. This is what I have to do. That’s it.
J.R. Bolt
Well, every time they do our they make decisions, but not moral decisions. Richard has to make the choice to join the classics group, and then they have to make the choice to kill we’re spoiling it anyway to kill bunny, yeah, yeah, we’re spoiling the choices they make. Oh, why am I worrying about spoilers in the book club? But yeah, all the choices they make serve to get them into further trouble and not to extricate them everything. It feels fatalistic that way, for sure, at no point do they make the choice to right not get in trouble or to not make the worst decision possible.
R.S. Benedict
And it feels like, I mean, is there any other choice than what to do with bunny? I guess it’s go to jail or kill him, because he’s he’s not gonna not fuck things up. Oh
J.R. Bolt
no, he’s the he’s the weak link. He’s the bit. By a zombie guy in the bunker.
R.S. Benedict
Now, you said in the outline, this book also has a lot of links to Brideshead Revisited. Yeah,
J.R. Bolt
that’s a book by Evelyn Waugh. It’s a I don’t even describe it. The main plot of Brideshead Revisited is about a middle class outside of this young guy, Charles Ryder, who joins this click of like a family of this rich Gentry called the flight family, and they pine for the glory days of English colonialism and aristocracy, and they are heavily Catholic and kitty kitty. Anyway, Charles has this like Charlie, yeah. Charles ends up having this very close, brotherly, but also ambiguously gay relationship with Sebastian flight, who was like the scion of the flight family. And at the time the secret history was being written, there was a ton of literary criticism. And like a hot literary topic of the late 80s, are Charles and Sebastian gay or not, this was a big deal. So so I feel like that informed Donna tart, on some level, she must have been aware of that argument and was maybe commenting on it directly. So some of the names even are similar. In Charles is a Charles IN THE SECRET HISTORY. And one thing that
R.S. Benedict
did have a same sex relationship with another character,
J.R. Bolt
yes, and the Bretton revisited is also a very Catholic novel evil, and while was a Catholic, and there’s a lot of religious topics within that book, and I think we could discuss that a little later, when we’re talking about the classical paganism in The Secret History. But there’s a, there’s an interesting commentary that I think is going on with that?
R.S. Benedict
Yeah, yeah. Well, we can definitely get to that later. Now there’s something kind of interesting, too. Classical theater had a limited number of actors on stage. It started just with, like, the chorus, and then you had one actor, and then you had two actors, and then three, and then four. And I’m not sure if that ever got up to five. It might have gotten up to five total like way after a long period of time. But there’s also a limited number of classic students in Julian’s classics group. And when we get the new guy, the old guy, through sheer coincidence, has to go. And there’s also this interesting thing that happens where it’s very, very rare that everybody’s like together for very long. Mostly it’s one guy running somewhere off in the background, and then somebody else runs it and goes like, holy shit, dude. What just happened? There’s a lot of action happening off stage, so to speak, which, again, in classical theater, so many of the old tragedies are consisting of a messenger running on stage and saying, like, holy shit, dude, some crazy stuff just happened. Let me tell you all about it. Let me just describe the action off stage, because actually making it happen would involve a level of special effects that were not available in the year 200 BC or so. And also, there might have just been a there might have been an esthetic preference to against spectacle, perhaps that at least in Greek times, it’s interesting
J.R. Bolt
that I think you’re really on the right track with that, and I think it’s really interesting to do that in the form of a book, because, you know, in a novel, you can have as much spectacle as you want, but as a deliberate tactic, it’s sort of It makes the setting feel much more claustrophobic, where Richard isn’t really involved in the action, but he’s he’s sort of stuck in his role as a listener. He doesn’t get to participate in the expansive sort of things that happen, right? And
R.S. Benedict
he’s in the dark, just completely confused, leaving us in the dark, which also allows us to play with ambiguity. I mean, if we had gotten to witness the bacal directly, I we would know, did Dionysus show up, what exactly happened? And I think that would kind of be make the book a little bit less interesting.
J.R. Bolt
Yeah, it would, I don’t know if less interesting. It would be a very different type of book. It would almost probably be like an Arthur mock in like horror story of of people trying to come to grips with the old gods,
R.S. Benedict
right? In this case, there’s just enough ambiguity or enough uncertainty where you’re going. Wait, what did it work? What? What exactly? What exactly happened? Why? How did Camille end up with only her hair covered in blood and everything else? Fine.
J.R. Bolt
Yeah, there’s, it’s a, I like how the Bucha now is described. It’s like it is ambiguously supernatural, but it never really tilts one way or the other. And of course, drugs are involved, so there’s a plausible deniability. But what people are seeing, and I do like that, it leans almost into sort of a cosmic horror thing, but never actually, never actually tilts that way. No,
R.S. Benedict
no, maybe Richard is just a little too footed in modernity and normal suburban American ness to totally let himself go into that. I mean, there’s a reason they chose not to involve him, not to involve him and not to. All bunny. So we should probably talk about the back eye this. This book draws very, very, very heavily from certain ancient Greek works. And one that it draws very heavily from is the back eye by Euripides. It’s a play about the cult of Dionysus. So I’m going to sum it up quickly. A king named Pentheus hates the cult of Dionysus. He believes that Dionysus is not really a God. So his mother was one of semile. That’s Dionysus mom’s sisters. And what it was is that simile got knocked up by Zeus, as many mortal women did, and when she told people, including her own sisters, they accused her of just making it up, saying like you didn’t really sleep with Zeus. You’re just a slut, basically. So simile went to Zeus because she was really upset, and people were like shit talking her, and demanded that he show himself to her in his full glory, which killed her. She kind of exploded, more or less, and Zeus gestated Dionysus in his thigh. So now Dionysus is out and about. He’s got a he’s got a cult back and doing like crazy shit in the forest. And now Emily’s his mother’s like his auntie Agave is in Dionysus cult. And that’s Pentheus his mother. So Pentheus mother is this crazed, feral woman who’s embarrassing the shit out of him running around feral in the wilderness, worshiping this false god. Dionysus tricks Pentheus into disguising himself as a manic as a crazy woman to spy on the back eye, and the back eye end up tearing him apart, believing him to be a lion, and his mother carries his severed head around bragging about, look at this cool lion I just killed, while everybody else is like, Holy fucking shit, that’s your son. You just ripped his head right the fuck off. You’re crazy. I think this one also draws heavily from the chain of blood, or the chain of vengeance from the Oresteia. That is a series of tragedies by Aeschylus, basically about people murdering each other back and forth. Agamemnon, whose dad seized power by killing a rivals children and feeding the children to their oblivious father, he sacrifices his daughter, Iphigenia. Iphigenia, I’m mispronouncing this so that he can win the Trojan War. So he goes to Troy sacks everybody brings home Cassandra as basically a sex slave and his wife, Clinton, estra I’m probably mispronouncing that too is really, really mad, because it’s like, Dude, you killed her daughter and now you’re bringing home a side piece, like, Come on, man, come so she and her lover, who’s one of the few surviving sons of the guy that Agamemnon’s father tricked into cannibalism stab Agamemnon in the bathtub. Later, Agamemnon and Clinton estrus, son Orestes returns home to avenge his father by killing his mother and his stepdad. And eventually it ends in this very weird law and order for the least procedural thing, where Athena convinces the Furies not to seek vengeance upon Orestes based on like the dudes rock women suck defense, more or less. But at any rate, it’s this chain of like back and forth, killing one side, kills someone from the other side, and then they have to be avenged. And it keeps going back and forth, and it becomes this self sustaining curse that, literally, the gods themselves have to intervene in order to stop it. So it’s we start with the students kill the farmer who they believe to be a deer, which recalls a whole lot of Greek mythology. Like Artemis turns a hunter who peeped on her while she was bathing into a deer, so that his own dogs kill him. In some versions of evigenias story, she gets turned into a deer at the last minute. Misgaves, there’s a lot of people in Greek mythology getting turned into animals. So because of the killing of the farmer. Now they go, have to, have to go and kill bunny in response. And when then the cops are chasing them, it looks like Charles is going to kill somebody else. It’s this self sustaining curse that’s wildly out of control. And let’s say, let’s say, if Charles did succeed in killing Henry, he’d get arrested, and that would even cause more problems. There’d probably have to be another killing in response. Somehow, there’s this repeated line in the Oresteia about blood washing away blood, which Henry literally tries to do with an animal. Early on, he tries to have everybody wash themselves off with blood of an animal after the murder. So it’s like the idea that one murder purges or balances another murder, except in the Oresteia. The phrase is used ironically, because, like, after, it’s something that Claire Nestor says after killing Agamemnon, like, ah, his blood washes away the blood of our daughter. Guess what? No, it isn’t. Your son’s gonna kill you. And after he or Orestes kills her, he says the same thing, but then the Furies chase him out, which, again, the Furies represent this older form of religion, before the Greek gods came to Ascendance. So that’s another term to tradition and rejecting the old ways. So in this one, the balancing of the scales, it’s kind of interesting. There’s no intervention by the gods. It’s Henry’s act of suicide that balances the scales. It’s you. Simultaneously like an act of murder, but the murderer himself is instantly killed because he’s killing himself. So it’s kind of two birds one stone, which I have to wonder, maybe that’s why the gun went off twice. There’s some, I’m guessing there’s some sort of symbolism in there. So, so there’s maybe a whole lot of Greek shit in this book, which I find absolutely fascinating and really interesting in sort of a modern twist of it.
J.R. Bolt
Yeah, all, all Greek tragedies and the Shakespearean tragedies that sort of followed, they all end with the death of the protagonist is the Revenger or the the person who’s been cursed. So, yeah, well, you were saying you noticed a lot of animal imagery and motifs in the book.
R.S. Benedict
There is animal imagery in this book. Well, I
J.R. Bolt
didn’t, I didn’t really notice it, but as a side note, I did like the scene where they try to sacrifice a piglet, or they do sacrifice a piglet and then bathe in its blood to balance the the blood. And that’s just another interesting thing that Richard doesn’t get to be part of. He just hears about it, and then he has to accept it. Oh, yeah, these are the people that kill piglets and bathe in their blood as part of a Roman or Greek tradition. And he just accepts that casually, like they never come back to that at all. It just happens. He’s like, Oh, that’s, that’s yeah, or
R.S. Benedict
remember, Henry’s experimenting with poison on that dude’s dogs. Yeah, the boxers, the dog,
J.R. Bolt
yeah. He’s like, I’m just testing out how to do it. And then Richard just like, oh, okay, fine, makes sense. And
R.S. Benedict
there’s this one scene where he’s driving with, is it with Francis? And they nearly run over an animal that’s running around in in in the darkness outside, and it’s like, doesn’t really get recalled, or doesn’t come up again. But there’s so much animal motifs over and over and over, like, kill is named bunny. He’s named after an animal. Yeah,
J.R. Bolt
and I do like that description in the in the driving scene, because they, they don’t identify what it is. They’re just like, they’re arguing about what say this, like, size and shape it was, and they’re just like, it was a beast, it was a monsters, like something, right? I love that. And they never come back to it. And you don’t know what it is. It could get could be, you know, the great god Pan it could be Dionysus. You don’t know.
R.S. Benedict
Yeah, it could just be someone’s fucked up dog. We have no idea. I like that kind of ambiguity. So, oh yeah, I really appreciate that. And even, I mean, Francis is referred to as Fox like, and very full vulpine or vulpe novo, there’s tons and tons of animal imagery, which is very much a Greek mythology thing, people are constantly turning into animals, and animal sacrifice was widely accepted. Completely normal, totally, totally cool in that society. It’s
J.R. Bolt
interesting that you say that about about Francis because I didn’t overtly notice the animal symbology, because I wasn’t really looking for it. But I guess it bled into my head, because I started thinking of Francis as being like a fox guy, almost like a, like a, you know, like you say, a vulpine, looking almost like a, you know, the red hair and everything. It’s interesting, but that was subtle enough for me not to catch overtly, but my subconscious did, right?
R.S. Benedict
Yeah, he had a narrow, angular face and and red hair. He was this fox, like little, little guy. But animal stuff aside, everybody in this book is out of time in some way, living a lifestyle that would be fine in classical times, but isn’t anymore homosexuality or bisexuality, incest, sleeping with a student. It’s strongly implied that Julian and Henry have a relationship that goes beyond, you know, a normal student, student, teacher relationship there. I mean, Richard walks out on them, making out pretty much, and is like, huh, clueless. Richard having no idea Henry’s lifestyle of just not having a formal schooling. He just has this very weird education, which was fine back then, a rich guy could just kind of study whatever you didn’t have a school system. Even Bunny’s lifestyle, believing that it’s vulgar to work for a living, even if you’re in an educated, high status position, that is very much a classical belief. The idea like, what you have a job, ew, that money is dirty if you had to earn it. Oh, absolutely a classical belief. Yeah,
J.R. Bolt
it is. It reflects the Greek and Roman social castes. And we’ll talk about that a little bit later too. Yeah,
R.S. Benedict
and they’re not just out of time. They’re out of time in a lot of different ways. Like Henry somehow doesn’t know about the moon landing and couldn’t believe it, like he thought Richard was making it up. Charles believes in humor theory and has to ask Richard about like, no germ germs exist, Charles. Charles I. Yeah, terms are real. That’s not how the human body fucking works. Charles, yeah, they’re
J.R. Bolt
completely clueless about anything modern, any anything that happened in the 20th century. They’re literally out of time, like they don’t experience the 20th century in almost any way. Yeah,
R.S. Benedict
you mentioned this. But for a novel set in the 80s, there’s weirdly little engagement with pop culture, you can easily forget that it takes place in the 80s, until these little moments like, oh, they, they, Richard has to go to the movies to and there’s a movie called field of shame, which is clearly about the Vietnam War. And to be sounds very much like it was modeled after platoon. And there’s a character that watches MTV, and Richard thinks, like, Oh, this is gross. I hate this. Yeah. He doesn’t
J.R. Bolt
nearly understand. Richard sort of gets to see from the outside, like 80s pop culture and like 80s modern people, and there are things like he runs across some students that are playing hip hop from a boom box in the in the comp campus. And he knows who. He sort of knows what it is, but he doesn’t talk about any of it. And then none of the characters have favorite movies or bands or they don’t engage with like current pop culture at all. They’re just completely ignorant of it. And and Donna tart herself seems to be at pains to erase what the actual date and the actual time and and when she actually refers to like a distinct event or a current event that happens. It almost seems like a slip up. There’s there’s one thing that I’m thinking of when Julian talks about this thing with the Israeli government, which is obviously based on Iran, the Iranian Revolution, and the fatwas they put against people. And then I think it’s Julian or No, it’s the dean who comments on Julian being the Salman Rushdie of Hampton college. And that’s really interesting, because you can pinpoint the date, because Salman Rushdie had the fatwa put on him after the Satanic Verses came out, and that was in like 1989 right? So the book probably has to take place either then or a couple years later, and for a book that’s like almost 800 pages long, that’s nothing to go on like this, he she, so she’s deliberately trying to to make it a vague time and place, yeah,
R.S. Benedict
especially to their distinctions of characters clothing, which is so odd, he repeatedly mentions how these characters are wearing suits. Like, it’s not a big deal. Like, that’s pretty fucking weird for college students to wear suits. Yeah, 80s. I don’t think that was normal,
J.R. Bolt
not unless you were playing. I mean, if you’re Depeche like,
R.S. Benedict
just to regularly wear suits all the time. Yeah,
J.R. Bolt
and we can makers old cut suits as well, like they do talk about getting tailored and the fancy sort of made up brand names and stuff, but they’re definitely not into 80s fashion or anything contemporary. And that’s another thing that
R.S. Benedict
I think is no one’s wearing Blazers getting there, no one’s using hair spray, yeah,
J.R. Bolt
but that’s something that’s really interesting to me, compared to Bret Easton Ellis, who is entirely the opposite direction. His equally shallow and yeah, but his equally shallow and vapid characters are just the entire they’re obsessed with the contemporary landscape. They’re always referring to bands and things they see on TV,
R.S. Benedict
right? They have nothing else, yeah. And in
J.R. Bolt
a way, like, yeah, with the the way they use the classics in The Secret History is the same, like, they just don’t have much of interior lives. So that’s that is their pop culture, that all these, like old literary references and stuff that they make
R.S. Benedict
Right? Right? Right now, there’s also an asp or speaking of being out of time, I almost felt like Bunny’s big sin was being out of time, but in the wrong time, like he’s this weird 1940s guy. The way he talks is full of old boy, old sport. He drinks fucking malted milk. He’s
J.R. Bolt
gonna get into this jalopy and drive to Riverdale like
R.S. Benedict
you could absolutely see him being one of Holden Caulfield’s shitty classmates.
J.R. Bolt
Oh, yeah, I feel that may come from Brideshead Revisited as well. There’s an interesting parallel there, because the characters in Brideshead Revisited the flight family. They are also out of time. They’re like relics of the aristocracy, and they really wish they could go back to that time, but there’s, it’s funny, because in Bradford visited, there are some disparaging references to people wearing pin sniz glasses and things like that. And that seems to be the era and the type of people that that bunny is modeling himself after, right?
R.S. Benedict
And Francis, he wears pins past near glasses, not lenses in them. Oh, my God, what a hipster. Oh my god, I love him. I fucking Yeah. Francis
J.R. Bolt
is kind of an MP he’s ridiculous.
R.S. Benedict
He rocks. He’s so good. He is 100% the kind of. Ridiculous gay boy that I always got an unrequited crush on,
J.R. Bolt
people, the whole group. He’s the least, worst of them. He’s the most, it seems
R.S. Benedict
like shitty. Yeah, yeah. He’s, I mean, there’s, well, there’s Camilla, but she’s, she’s odd. She’s an odd one. But anyway, before we get into the characters too much, there’s also something in Greek tragedy in Greek theater, which is the wearing of masks. Every member of this group, all of these characters, are wearing a mask like an actor in a Greek tragedy. Richard is pretending to be wealthier and more fabulous than he is. Charles and Camilla pretend like that their relationship is somehow normal and healthy. Bunny hides how broke he is. Julian turns out to be nothing underneath. He’s like a flattering mirror to other people. Henry’s whole fucking everything is a mask. No one knows what the fuck is going on in there. And Francis, I think, tries to put on this glib, kind of mean, catty persona, but he’s a massive softy underneath. He’s incredibly sentimental, and though he tries to act like this mean, catty guy, like, the instant a handsome boy pays him attention, he’s like, I love you. I would die for you. Please take all of my money. I plea just tears, literally all of my money. Please don’t leave me. He’s so pitiful. Yeah, and, of course, he’s being taken advantage of telling Yeah.
J.R. Bolt
And even his own alleged best friends are taking advantage of him. Oh
R.S. Benedict
yeah, Charles is totally taking advantage of him all the time. Yeah.
J.R. Bolt
And Henry as well, because, you know, Henry must have an awareness that Francis is in love with him. Oh
R.S. Benedict
yeah, yeah. And I just, I feel like Richard doesn’t know that he’s a little bit taking advantage of him, like, Richard doesn’t know this, but he’s completely leading him on in the way that Camilla’s leading Richard on, but he doesn’t seem to realize it. There’s a whole lot going on there about like, Oh, I knew eventually he was gonna hit on me, and he was, I was thinking about it all. I couldn’t stop thinking about it. And then it happened, and I told him no. And it was such a relief. It was such a relief to get it over with. That’s why I’m glad it happened. But then it, like, keeps kind of going on. Like, yeah, you can, you can sit in my bed. Let’s get drunk together. Like, do you understand what’s what’s your? Um, all right. Oh, he’s giving you his clothing. He’s giving Oh, Rich. Rich, really?
J.R. Bolt
Yeah, that sort of seems like the ambiguity of that as well. It’s like, you can, you can say, Yo, yeah, the there was a, there was a attention love story. But the way Richard frames it is very ambiguous. And of course, he’s playing it down as a narrator, which is interesting, because that’s the same, which is the same type of debate that they were having about Charles and Sebastian in the Brideshead Revisited.
R.S. Benedict
And I can’t help but notice that whenever Richard talks about how beautiful Camilla is, he keeps calling her boyish boyish, her beautiful, boyish hip, her boyish this, her boyish blah, blah, blah, like
J.R. Bolt
and she’s often wearing, like, you know, boyish clothes, yeah,
R.S. Benedict
like, masculine clothes, dresses like Charles,
R.S. Benedict
yeah. So there’s, there’s definitely, it’s strongly implied that Richard is kind of into dudes, but is attempting to suppress it in some way or not quite aware of himself. There
J.R. Bolt
all for all, Richard digresses, and, you know, looks into his own psychology. To some extent, there’s a lot of things that he leaves out, like he is a he’s a flawed narrator, absolutely,
R.S. Benedict
absolutely flawed. He and I feel like one of the reasons why they kill bunny is because he’s trying to go and mask off, oh, absolutely. In addition to threatening to rat them out to the cops. He’s also telling the truth about them, and he’s telling it in a fucking mean and nasty way, but it’s he’s the only one who’s, like, actually acknowledging what’s really going on. Like, you You’re fucking your sister, you’re poor, you’re gay, you know, you’re fucking weird and like, that’s the reason they really kind of decide to kill him. He doesn’t let them keep up these illusions about themselves. And he’s the one who also exposes what’s really going on to Julian, who, like, he must have fucking known Julian must have known there was something fucking up. It’s when he exposes the reality to Julian that Julian just fucking disappears. Yeah,
J.R. Bolt
that’s really interesting. I do think what they you know, how, how tart characterizes bunny, is really interesting. Because, on one hand, he’s, he’s a very genial, loud sort of, he has these likable traits where you’re like, Oh yeah, I’d like to hang out with this guy. Seems really funny, but if you spend five minutes with him, he’s ranting about the gays, and he’s, he becomes like, this really repulsive person under the surface, and you very quickly lose sympathy for him, and so when the time comes for him to be killed, like the reader is on their side, not not on bunnies. He’s an asshole. He’s a monster.
R.S. Benedict
Right at the end of chapter one, I’m like, Oh, I kind of like, Bunny. It’s a shame he’s gonna die. He seems like this kind of funny, charming guy. By the end of chapter two, I’m like, I will personally kill bunny with my bare hands. He ate a girl’s cheesecake from the fridge, right? Oh yeah, that is you deserve to fucking die. He still saw, like a scholarship kid’s cheesecake and just ate it. Please don’t eat this. This is my cheesecake.
J.R. Bolt
Did you notice the murder family trait though, that Mr. Cocorin, like and Henry steal that big case of beer that was donated to the the search parties, and they come back to the house with it, and they just steal it, even though
they’re like, super
rich. There’s like these, like,
R.S. Benedict
everybody steals, bunnies moms various pills, yeah?
J.R. Bolt
Which they have a huge Pharmacopeia of they have, like, hundreds, way
R.S. Benedict
too many pills. Yeah, it’s, it’s such like a 1960s rich person family, in a way, where the mom is on everything. They
J.R. Bolt
had great loops back then. That was a good Yeah, all right,
R.S. Benedict
so let’s talk a little more about the characters we’ve started getting into, though, into them a little bit. You said Bunny was named after someone, yes,
J.R. Bolt
Edmund bunny Wilson, who was a, I think he was a British literary critic. He wrote extensively about Brideshead Revisited, actually, and he was also a TS Eliot critic, and Donna Tartt was like a huge fan of TS Eliot, so I’m pretty sure it was a deliberate nod to him. But bunny Wilson was a Marxist, and he approached everything from the left. And of course, Bunny Corcoran would have found that disgusting right,
R.S. Benedict
right now, one of my favorite characters is someone who’s not in the the main group. She’s just kind of a side character, a small character, but Judy fucking poovi. I
J.R. Bolt
love Judy poovi. She’s like my ideal. I love
R.S. Benedict
Judy. She rocks. She’s awesome. I find her so interesting because in a lot of books, a lot of books about like, brainy intellectuals. Hello, Henny. Calm down, baby. I know. I know. Usually I feed them at this time. So she’s like, crying because we started a little late. But, um, usually in pop culture story, in stories like this, where somebody is frustrated with the modern world, they whip out a character, kind of like Judy poovi, who’s usually a young, attractive, kind of ditsy woman to represent everything wrong with modernity,
J.R. Bolt
right? Yeah, yeah. You see that in movies of the time too. Every
R.S. Benedict
alt right meme has this like, modern woman who sucks. She’s drinking yerba mate, She’s awful. And every she’s going, every like, Look at this. Look at this bitch who listens to pop music like every single she cares
J.R. Bolt
about, fascio, I hate them. She does makeup.
R.S. Benedict
What kind of a shallow bitch cares about the way she looks? Now, stand aside and watch me judge every female character based on her appearance. You know, like every single so many of these things have that kind of character. The sort of in touch with pop culture kind of cool girl is like, she’s so bad, she’s a symbol of modern society degeneracy, blah, blah, blah. And in the
J.R. Bolt
beginning, that’s what Richard thinks at the beginning, oh yeah. And
R.S. Benedict
there’s that jealousy too, and that these, these books are written by Weird nerds who, like, wanted to fuck that girl but couldn’t. Or if it’s written by a woman, it’s often written by the uncool girl who’s a bit jealous, to be honest, that like, Man, why can’t I be hot and popular, like that bitch? But, but, and that’s what it looks like at the beginning with this character, but as the novel progresses, she becomes probably one of the most decent people in this
J.R. Bolt
Yeah, moral center, she would be disgusted by what’s going on behind the scenes. She’s a nice person. She’s a sweetheart, and she she introduces Richard to a better life, right?
R.S. Benedict
Like when his friend dies, when bunny dies, and for all anybody knows that this was just an accident, and this guy just lost one of his few friends. Like the other classics, people just disappear on him. To be fair, Henry’s got to deal with a Cochrane and he’s got to deal with his things, but like Charles and Camilla just sort of disappear. Francis just goes off to the cabin to live with his aunt. No one offers to give Richard a place to stay or to help him out. No one says, Hey, I know you’re Californian. We’re on the East Coast. Your family’s super far away. Why don’t you stay with us? They just fucking leave him alone. And like Judy, actually looks after him. She sits Shiva with him. She does it in her way, which is like, let’s eat snacks and drink and watch MTV. But that’s a really sweet thing to do. And she even brings a couple of times, girls who are very much his type to keep him company, right? Like she is a sweetie.
J.R. Bolt
At the end of the novel, Richard is he spends a lot of time dating one of those girls that that Judy introduced him to, yeah,
R.S. Benedict
and she’s constantly trying to be like, Dude, come on, let’s go to a party. Get laid, come on. And he’s like, modernity. And the one time. He actually goes to one of these parties. He has a great time. It’s fun, it’s normal. He dances. He has he has a good night with a pretty girl. It’s fucking great. And it’s like, Richard, this is, these are the people you’ve been avoiding, and they’re lovely. And I loved that aspect of the novel, because I’m thinking of how many, how many of these stories about an isolated person who doesn’t fit into the modern world, where it’s like, well, the modern world is completely awful, and he’s so much better than everyone. And it’s like, no, you are at least in part the problem. Yeah, okay, modern culture is kind of vapid. But that doesn’t mean that everybody who watches MTV is a sub human monster for crazy sake,
J.R. Bolt
which, you know, Richard does find out eventually. If the
R.S. Benedict
worst thing you can say about a woman is she likes Madonna too much, that’s not really a bad thing,
J.R. Bolt
- And even, uh even, cloak Rayburn turns out to be not so bad. He’s He’s a douche bag, but not like an evil douche bag. He’s just kind of a,
R.S. Benedict
yeah, he’s like a standard variety douche bag. Yeah, he’s like a petty, normal douche bag. And stealing guy, like, in his way, stealing pills from Bunny’s mom to give to Richard. Is him trying to help? Yeah,
J.R. Bolt
that’s the only way he knows how he’s the way of his people,
R.S. Benedict
yeah, but, but, he’s like, but he gives him shit for free. And he like, gives Charles some weed for, probably, for free or something, which is, like, a really cool thing.
J.R. Bolt
He advises Richard on have to go to that funeral. Yeah, exactly.
R.S. Benedict
He didn’t have to show up. I mean, he he ends up, like, leaving before he gets to the wake at some point. But it’s like, you know what? He didn’t have to go all that fucking way. Well,
J.R. Bolt
cloak Rayburn is also like the first to crack in front of the FBI and talk about the the New York Association that bunny is supposed to have had, but in the end, didn’t. It was just, it was just cook. Ray burns fear of working overtime, but he’s a, he’s the, he’s the most sensitive, right, right,
R.S. Benedict
as opposed to the sociopathic fucking crazy shit that all these other characters are, yeah, oh my god, we gotta talk about Henry in there. But I love quote. I love cloak being interviewed in the press, saying Bunny was a stand up guy who definitely wasn’t involved in drugs like, god damn it, cloak this.
J.R. Bolt
And how could any 90s like read that line and not know that it was a comedy, or not know that it was supposed to be funny? I don’t get any the people who call this book humorless. I don’t understand them.
R.S. Benedict
I don’t understand it’s really for so many absurd there’s so
J.R. Bolt
many lines, and there’s so many little almost like cringe comedy awkwardness, that just it really works. It’s really funny. Yeah,
R.S. Benedict
the gulf between who these characters try to present themselves are as versus who they actually are is fucking hysterical, so cool and sophisticated, and everyone else is like, Who are these fucking weirdos? Jesus Christ? Maybe Judy poovi Is the chorus. There’s always got to be a chorus or something. She’s normal society, and the first thing she says about Henry is like, yeah, that guy’s fucking weird. Man, yeah. Like
J.R. Bolt
a normal person would notice that there’s a funny part
R.S. Benedict
today. You’re weird. We have not talked about Henry enough. Henry is such a fascinating character in a lot of ways, and I’m definitely not going to be the first person to say this, but he Henry strikes me as being very on the spectrum. He’s he just, it just happens that he’s hyper focused on invoking the god Dionysus, which is a shame. If he’d been a more normal person, he could have just gotten hyper focused on trains and everything would be okay,
J.R. Bolt
yeah. And it’s also, it’s, it’s Julian that puts them on to this. I don’t know what his role quite would be. In classical mythology, there’s, there’s a, there’s a character named selenice or Salinas, who is Dionysus mentor, and he has this sort of dark philosophy. There’s a famous quote of something like, it’s, it’s better for men to not have been born at all, but if he is born, than to live as short as possible. Like this sort of, like really bleak philosophy. And I’m not really sure how much Julian overlaps with that, but as the mentor character who is sort of feeding the classics group, this Greek aristocratic sort of will to power philosophy, philosophy, maybe there’s a link there. I thought it was interesting, right,
R.S. Benedict
right? And it’s true that he doesn’t it’s all fake. When he’s confronted with the outcome of this actual philosophy. He just disappears. Oh yeah, he just doesn’t write a goodbye note. He’s just gone. I read this.
J.R. Bolt
I read this retrospective. I think it was called, I know the secret history at 30 or something. It was actually a Gawker article that talks about Julian and Salinas this way and that. Also got me thinking about the the novels Catholicism, or the the absence of, I guess, because Evelyn Waugh was, was a Catholic author, right? And Brideshead Revisited was a heavily Catholic book writer, Charles Ryder actually ends the book being a convert to Catholicism, and a lot of the the book itself is about Catholic topics of grace and redemption, and the people not being able to get married because they don’t share the same faith, and all this other sort of stuff. And it turns out that Donna tart herself is a Catholic, which is it’s an interesting lens through which to look at the secret history, and there’s been a bit of writing on it that I’ve tried to look through but I’m not a Catholic myself, but I did go to Catholic school for a little while, and from a Catholic perspective, The Secret History is almost like a warning a Rake’s progress, sort of anti morality thing that shows you what happens to people in the absence of religion, of Christianity, because there are no Christian there are no Christians, or, you know, any sign of God in The Secret History at all. It’s all pagan mythology. There
R.S. Benedict
is that one mechanic that’s super Christian mechanic who’s just nuts,
J.R. Bolt
oh, the the evangelical crazy man, yeah,
R.S. Benedict
yeah, who’s just completely full of shit, yeah, who’s just
J.R. Bolt
using he’s using the tragedy to get on TV and to rant about the the Arabs on his racist rant.
R.S. Benedict
Yeah, not Catholic, though. He’s very much an American evangelist. He’s
J.R. Bolt
American to the core, yeah. Oh yeah, but yeah, I did get a sense that there is a moral critique in in the secret history about what might happen without, without Christianity as a grace, if people did go back to the old ways and the old morality. And in a way that sort of, that sort of makes me think of the Greek and Roman social casts, right? Because the the classic students are trying to reproduce these, these Athenian social cast, right? In this modern, sort of egalitarian setting, they sort of see themselves. They come to see themselves as like aristocrats unbounded by conventional morality. So the four rich students and Julian might be considered the citizens the upper class who had authority over everyone else. And Richard would be like a medic or metic, I’m not sure to pronounce that, but he’d be like the middle class, right? The the reverse sort of thing, and then the farmer who gets killed, and the associated people that the students don’t care about, they’re the freedmen. They’re just the laborers. They have no real rights. They’re just there to be abused. Because in Roman times, you you know, a citizen could kill a Freedman and there’d be no consequence, really, right
R.S. Benedict
there. There was no sense of universal human rights. There was an incredibly strict social hierarchy, and it was totally fine to do whatever you wanted to somewhat lower on hierarchy. It was okay. And definitely
J.R. Bolt
Julian feeds into that sense of elitism that your other rarefied group. You can do whatever you want. You can you are the the senators. Yeah,
R.S. Benedict
you’re, you’re the elites here, you’re the good ones. You’re so you’re our special kids. I’m only having the five of you, and I’m he’s deliberately separating the five of these students from the rest of their classmates to try to feed into this idea of we’re, I’m better than them. We’re better than them. We’re so special. Yeah? And
those terrible people
R.S. Benedict
who listen to MTV, yeah,
J.R. Bolt
Julian, he becomes, in retrospect, one of the most disgusting characters. For that reason. He sets them up to believe all that, and then he just scoots it. He’s gone.
R.S. Benedict
You just leave. I do think it’s worth noting that it’s mentioned that George Orwell, obviously, this is fictional, but George Orwell mentioned, ran into him at a party and said, wrote later, like, this guy fucking sucks. Like, I think the fact that it’s George Orwell who was a leftist is very deliberately chosen. Yeah,
J.R. Bolt
very much. I mean, you can’t imagine any of the characters having any positive associations with the left. I mean, the only character that’s even mentioned as being like a leftist is, I can’t remember her name, but she she leads some kind of protest group, and she’s kind of like a parodic character. I don’t even think she’s on on on the page for more than, like half a page.
R.S. Benedict
Yeah, she’s mentioned very, very briefly, but, but I think she comes across as like a decently well intentioned person for the moment that she’s in there, just like alien to the surprisingly, the novel doesn’t do that thing where it’s like, look at this stupid leftist bitch who believes in things. Surprisingly,
J.R. Bolt
oh yeah, yeah. That could have been an easy direction to go in, where it’s like, yeah,
R.S. Benedict
she’s naive, but she’s not an asshole. And they make fun of hippies, but the hippies aren’t shitty people. They’re just kind of Doofy, yeah. They’re just, well, there’s the mandolin, fucking mandolin hippie guy. But like to be fair, hippie business owners really are that shitty? Yeah, I work for a hippie restaurant owner. It really, it was that shitty. They’re, they’re fucking horrible people. Mandolin guy. Mandolin guy sucks. I
J.R. Bolt
was gonna ask you earlier, I’m a West. Coaster. I never went to any kind of I’d never been to the East Coast. I’ve never been to New England, and I haven’t attended a sort of high ranked Ivy League university. But you’ve sort of been in that, in that while you Is it accurate? Yeah,
R.S. Benedict
I’ve had both, weirdly, like I went to for undergrad, I went to a very small liberal arts college in Vermont that considered itself a rival at Bennington, but Bennington didn’t know what we existed. So like, reading this gave me really weird fucking flashbacks. I mean, I went 20 years after Donna Tartt did, but yeah, there is still a lot of that hippie culture there, because Vermont is kind of a cool place in that you can sort of do your own thing. There’s a little bit of that New England self reliance, New England individualism thing going on there, but without the sort of hardcore nasty meanness as much in that’s in other parts of New England, like Maine, can get really fucking reactionary and weird. And Vermont isn’t that bad, though. Granted, this was Vermont in the 80s. It might have been a different culture, I don’t know, but yeah, a hell of a lot of this ring rang true. I in terms of, how do the students feel about like farmers and stuff? I don’t know. I think that’s just if you’re a liberal, a social class thing, you’re you’re, if you’re going to a liberal arts college, you’re probably wealthy, and you’re like, ew, rural people who are poor growth. That’s not like me.
J.R. Bolt
I did appreciate there were a bunch of scenes in The Secret History where the classic students go out of town and they do to various things, and they end up interacting with these farmers and these rural people in different ways, and going to their bars and stuff like that. And I didn’t get the sense of much in the way of a class or social enmity. They always seem to ignore each other. Was that like, is that like a cultural element of Vermont. Where did people just like, live and let live? Yeah. I mean,
R.S. Benedict
generally, I never felt a sense of townies hating the students. There didn’t seem to be that feeling of, oh, these fucking kids. It’s just like, Yeah, whatever. Man, we don’t care. Yeah.
J.R. Bolt
A bunch of people dressed as undertakers come in to drink some beers, and no one really pays attention. I think that that absence is interesting, because a lot of writers would definitely make that a thing. They would probably try to do some outsiders type stuff with the town, right?
R.S. Benedict
That cliched thing where you enter the dive bar and then two guys who are playing pool challenge you to fight,
J.R. Bolt
yeah, and I’m glad that didn’t happen. That was refreshingly like real fucking
R.S. Benedict
Jesus. That didn’t happen, that would be so bad, but
J.R. Bolt
I couldn’t imagine Donna tart going that direction, because everything that happened in this book is quite unexpected and a little subversive, not in the way that it’s like we use the term subversive, but it subverts a lot of its own expectations for its genre, and it’s sort of its type,
R.S. Benedict
right? Absolutely. Yeah. So a lot of what’s going on in the book, culturally and about Vermont being kind of its own weird little, little place like that did definitely ring true to me.
J.R. Bolt
That’s great. I really love the description of the landscapes and weather that Donna Tartt uses. She’s she’s really good at painting with words and just creating these, these atmospheric settings. The description of the wind storm happening during the funeral, I mean, that’s a gothic touch that I liked. And the just little details of people be umbrellas being blown away, and all this extraneous detail that’s really interesting, and it just sets the stage
R.S. Benedict
the details walking to and from work when he’s living in the shitty mandolins unheated attic, and how he asked every day he stops the weather ritual where he stops at the bridge and plunks a big rock into the water
J.R. Bolt
that feels very old school romantic as well, like the the Dionysian sort of expressing itself through the weather, through nature itself. Right? How? You know, you do get a sense of how dangerous the Vermont weather is and how powerful it is, of course. And you know, for a story that takes place on a campus, you wouldn’t ordinarily probably get that the
R.S. Benedict
weather fucks with them so much the fact that it snows right after they kill bunny, yeah, exactly.
J.R. Bolt
It’s like the weather. The gods are in on it, yeah.
R.S. Benedict
Or, hey, guess what? You smarty pants. You, you don’t control the weather. You think you’re so great. Guess what? Snow nothing you can do about that. Control very much. It’s, you know, nature is going to do what it’s going to do, and you can’t do shit about that.
J.R. Bolt
And that’s a Dionysian idea, too. Like the dichotomy between Dionysian and Apollonian, where the Apollonian people are the Enlightenment people. They they they obey a reason. They’re clockwork logic. They’re they’re the reasonable types in the Dionysian or the romantic ideas or powerful emotions, releasing yourself to nature, to natural law and natural morality, which is, you know, oftentimes no morality at all, right? So you get these really self possessed sort of stick up ass people like out and struggling in the weather and all their plans are subject to fate and just. Yeah, because, because it is faded, it’s very gothic in how just the world, especially the snowstorm, to me, is the big clue to that, that it doesn’t feel like an accident that was done, almost like for spiritual reasons,
R.S. Benedict
right? We’re going to complicate this issue. And, yeah, gosh, now I think there’s a lot to say about this attempt to return to tradition, but I think there’s a little bit of poking the book does of saying like, well, you keep wanting to return to these traditions because you think that would enrich your life and make make your life more happy and meaningful, but you’re kind of already there, like, after the death of bunny, the campus engages in its own back in all ritual of grief, and the figure of bunny becomes almost this mythical figure. People have memories of him that absolutely never happened. People swear they’ve seen him. They have visions of him after he’s dead. And they’re not real, but they’re just as real to these people as Dionysus was to the the back eye, to the main heads. Yeah, it’s kind of like, well, you’re trying to go back to you’re trying to go back to this sort of old Greek way, but you’re already there, buddy,
J.R. Bolt
yeah, they’re, they’re trying to create a mythological figure out of bunny.
R.S. Benedict
The accessories are different, but the people really haven’t changed that much. Yeah, exactly.
J.R. Bolt
There are. There are sort of little Bucha nows in the campus as well, like you have the the parties with the the firelight, the burning stuff on the campus grounds of people getting their ecstatic frenzy with the music. They’re all having their own little jewels around money, right?
R.S. Benedict
And Richard rejects it as much as these guys all want to, like, we want to return to tradition. And, you know, be like the Greeks, like we’re on a campus. What does Greek life mean on campus? You know, you could have taken part in this, and you just chose to do it in a super fucking weird way, because you had to be so goddamn special.
J.R. Bolt
Oh yeah. I mean, you say Greek life. I don’t suppose there are fraternities in small, rural arts colleges in new in Vermont, not so
R.S. Benedict
much. But those two guys, what were they, like, bullet or Judd or something? Oh, yeah, Judd, or as close to frat boys as you can possibly get,
J.R. Bolt
they made up their own frat basically just by being two guys that can’t be expelled. The party dudes
R.S. Benedict
we are going to throw the bunny Cocker and memorial mixer. This is what he would have wanted. He would have wanted us to party. Please give us money so we can buy more beer.
J.R. Bolt
Those guys are way cooler than bunny. It’s the tribute he deserves, really, yeah, to get something that that bunny would throw a shoe at from his window.
R.S. Benedict
It is the tribute he deserves. That’s what I said, right?
J.R. Bolt
So what else do we have to say about the secret history?
R.S. Benedict
I guess I could. One thing I could add is it is interesting while, while it’s very clearly showing us why this is a bad idea, we do kind of understand why Richard is attracted to it. When you first meet these characters, they are kind of interesting and have this mystique. And 80s pop culture was incredibly vapid and annoying. I know we all have 80s nostalgia now, but it was actually really fucking shitty and incredibly homophobic and and most, most of it was just bad sitcoms and really bad, bland pop music. Everybody remembers the good pop music and Kate Bush, but Kate Bush was a little bit counter culture. The actual top 40 was Olivia Newton John’s, Let’s Get Physical, like really fucking awful, bland, annoying pop culture. So you can kind of see why you’d want to get away from that, and what views, what glimpses we get of Richard’s family and upbringing sound pretty crappy, like that awful, boring suburban Ness with his dad, who’s kind of a jerk, you can kind of see why he wants to escape it in a way, absolutely,
J.R. Bolt
piano California sounds like a hell hole, not, not a rotting like dystopian hell hole, but a suburban hell hole, which is pretty much as bad,
R.S. Benedict
yeah. But the thing that I think, think is kind of interesting is that Richard’s middle class suburbanness, the thing that he’s trying to flee from, his lack of aristocracy, is really the thing that saves him, because at the end, the surviving members of this crew, like they have, they’re non they’re non existent. Camilla is living alone with her auntie, just taking care of her auntie.
J.R. Bolt
Camilla basically became the lady from gray gardens. That’s a tragedy.
R.S. Benedict
She’s the lady from gray gardens. I. Charles is just an alcoholic. Yeah, that’s all he’s doing. Like, Francis is trapped in this terrible relationship.
J.R. Bolt
Yeah, his his beard marriage, or whatever. It’s terrible, yes, just
R.S. Benedict
awful. And like, Richard is the only one who has had to support himself in any way. So he’s the only one who knows how to do this shit, and he doesn’t really have Henry to guide him, but he doesn’t exactly need Henry to tell him how to live his life. So he’s like, Yeah, sure, I’ll just get a job and shit whatever.
J.R. Bolt
Yeah. I mean, can survive in the modern world? Can you imagine the others knowing how to pump gas or do anything for themselves?
R.S. Benedict
Right? Okay, so I think we’ve been talking for about an hour. So why don’t we start winding down any final thoughts, questions, comments about the secret history? Oh,
J.R. Bolt
it’s hard to encapsulate. I really love the book. I think it was fantastic. I think it was always a pleasure to read. And Donna start. Donna Tarta courses a great stylist, just on a prose level, the ability to write a cracking line or a great description of a person or a place, and she is clearly very excellent writer, just as a literary pleasure.
R.S. Benedict
Yeah, I was so worried because I I’d forgotten how long this book was, but everybody in the discord was really engaged with it, and most mostly engaged with, how would you murder bunny? What method would you use to murder bunny? Would you use the Henry thing and, like, turn it into a logic puzzle? Would you use a shovel? How would you kill bunny? My answer is, I would put a poisoned cheesecake in the fridge and label it. Please do not eat my cheesecake. I am Mary Jo, and I am on a scholarship, and then I would let nature take care of itself.
J.R. Bolt
Yep, just get some botulism. Plausible deniability. You didn’t do it. Yeah,
R.S. Benedict
exactly. Put the thing self on the cheese.
J.R. Bolt
Listeners write in with your comments. How would you kill bunny? How would
R.S. Benedict
you kill bunny? Sound off below in the comments. How would you kill bunny, by the way? Hmm,
J.R. Bolt
I like your idea. Penny, how would
R.S. Benedict
you kill bunny? I could feed the remains so these cats, Henny,
J.R. Bolt
would just prevent bunny from sleeping. Dive, insomnia.
R.S. Benedict
Yeah, oh yeah. Okay. So my cats are screaming at me to feed them, so we should probably wrap this up. Where can our listeners find and support your work? Well,
J.R. Bolt
my work is currently on my Twitter account. That’s all. That’s a that’s the only public work at the moment, although I am working on a novel that’s not like the secret history, but I do a podcast called The pod hand, which will return. I do promise that I will be upon that in the next month, right? Corgi, hell, if you want to read my bullshit, yeah, if
R.S. Benedict
you want to read some very good shit posting, okay, well, thank you for coming on and for reading this enormous, huge
J.R. Bolt
book. Yeah, it was a pleasure. Thanks for having me, and thank
R.S. Benedict
you all for listening and supporting us. That’s all for this month’s episode. If you haven’t already, check out the discord until next time, keep reading and keep writing good.