Yeah. That’s the high we’ve all been chasing since The Secret History came out. Every publication season, there’s some new book that the publisher and reviewers insist is just like The Secret History, and if you’re like me, you fall for it every time. You just want that feeling back. You need it. You need it.

At the end of one (1) decade of chasing that The Secret History high, I need to report that it is not replicable. No book, except for one, will ever be The Secret History. It’s not even that no book will ever be that good, because The Secret History isn’t even my favorite book.¹ It’s just that no book will ever be that exact combination of rarefied college Latin nonsense and suspense powerful enough to prize apart my ribs. No campus novel will ever be such a successful iteration of Macbeth. No Macbeth will ever be a campus novel. The Secret History is the perfect marriage of forms. I have to stop wishing that it could be recreated, and instead live satisfied with the knowledge that one such book exists.

“What you’re saying is you finished The Truants?”

UGH YES I FINISHED The Truants. It was no The Secret History, because — as I have proved to myself one million goddamn times now — no other book is ever going to be The Secret History. But here are some of the books that I wished and hoped would be.

(Note: As a marketing strategy, it’s quite solid to compare a book to The Secret History. Evidence: I always want to believe it, and I always read the book. But it’s no mindset to bring to the reading of a book you hope to enjoy. Like, it seems perfectly possible that I might have read and enjoyed any of these books, had I not gone into them wishing they were an exact recreation of one of my all-time faves. That sort of expectation does not a generous reader make.)

The Truants, by Kate Weinberg

I actually enjoyed this one! I think. Somewhat. It’s hard to know, because so much of my mind was taken up with the thought “this is not enough like The Secret History.”

The Truants is set in Norwich, an English town of which I am fond, and it features a charismatic, unreliable South African journalist called Alec, a friendly beautiful delight called Georgie, and an Agatha Christie expert called Lorna. The narrator is equally obsessed with all of them, and I think Weinberg does quite a good job of making the reader understand why — in that way where I, the reader, am too old and cynical to be swayed by these people but I totally get why a university student would not be. I moreover found the explanation of the death quite satisfying. I love the sort of story where you think all the mysteries have been revealed, but then there’s one final reveal that gets uncovered undramatically at the end.

Why it’s not enough like The Secret History: Not enough suspense! Not enough campus! I enjoyed it as a story about friendship and love and sex and death, but I wanted more information about Agatha Christie, and I definitely wanted everyone to feel more guilty and worry more about getting caught. That’s the aspect that absolutely kills me about The Secret History: how the reader is seduced into rooting for them to kill Bunny, and seduced into rooting for them not to get caught. It’s so insidious! It’s so good! It truly makes you confront the narrative weight that goes along with making someone a protagonist.

The Magicians, Lev Grossman

The Secret History meets the Chronicles of Narnia, said a bunch of lying liars, when this book came out. (They also said it was grown-up Harry Potter, which was a further piece of false advertising.) The Magicians has many good things about it and many bad things about it, but while it has many points in common with the Chronicles of Narnia and has clearly been heavily inspired by those books, it bears almost no similarity to The Secret History. Like, to the extent that I’m confused that anyone ever told me it was good for fans of The Secret History. I guess they just meant because it was a campus novel? Ish?

I would also like to take this opportunity to mention that in my year of being a finisher (2019), I wished to finish The Magicians but had to stop because I was so mad about a certain event that occurred at the end of season four. Like, seriously. Some shows will do anything to avoid having a canonical queer romance, incl. being really irresponsible in their depiction of mental illness. This is why all shows should just be CW shows. CW shows have gotten gayer and gayer year over year, to their great advantage.

If We Were Villains, M. L. Rio

Things I remember about If We Were Villains, a book I read fewer than five years ago:

• Shakespeare stuff that was like fine I guess but also mainly made me want to reread the parts of Pamela Dean’s Tam Lin where Janet and her friends go see plays at the local theater. I very much enjoyed those parts, not least because they convinced me to read Christopher Fry’s The Lady’s Not for Burning, which is a very good play indeed.
• One of the characters was called Wren, and I liked that. My name is Jenny as in Jenny Wren, so yes, I do enjoy a fictional Wren.
• Maybe some sort of very annoying power couple
• Actually had some canon gay characters
• Some sort of a scene at a lake? Something that happens at a lake at night? I don’t remember. There is a lake, I think, in this book.

If my very limited memory of this book serves, this is the one from my list that felt the most like The Secret History, although it was still very much the diet version. If I had enough time to reread this book, I’d honestly just reread The Secret History instead.

Long Black Veil, Jennifer Finney Boylan

This is the only fiction book I’ve read by Jennifer Finney Boylan, an author whose memoirs I truly adore. She’s one of these memoirists with a true knack for marrying jokes to tragedy in a way that plays up the best parts of both. Any day now, I am going to feel strong enough to face her latest book, which is about dogs and will certainly break my heart.

Long Black Veil is probably the book in this list that most suffered by comparison with The Secret History. Not because it’s the least satisfactory, but because that comparison sets up an expectation for what type of book this is, and that expectation isn’t at all in line with the book Boylan actually wrote. It was marketed as a thriller, when in fact it’s a much slower and more thinky book that explores conflict between identity and morality. It’s good, to the best of my memory! Just, like, not at all similar to The Secret History.

Special Topics in Calamity Physics, Marisha Pessl

I’m cheating by including Special Topics in Calamity Physics on this list! I reread it in the years between my first and second reads of The Secret History, which was the era in which I was least high on The Secret History and thus least furious when books failed to live up to it. Moreover, I picked up Special Topics in the bookshop and purchased it because he was on significant sale — not because I had been told that it was similar to The Secret History.

In fact, I might have liked it better on a first read if I had understood that it was similar in spirit to The Secret History. I bought it because I loved the writing (and because, as mentioned, it was on significant sale)! I thought it was going to be a bildungsroman! It is not a bildungsroman! Do not go into it expecting a bildungsroman! It is significantly more bananas than that! The writing is also just truly delightful — funny, referential, self-deprecating — and I loved the bananas twist that gets revealed about two-thirds of the way through the book. So, as a book qua book, Special Topics in Calamity Physics is my favorite from this list.

The Bellwether Revivals, Benjamin Wood

I cleverly used the “here are bullet points of what I remember from this book” on When We Were Villains rather than The Bellwether Revivals. This was a great idea because I do not remember enough things about The Bellwether Revivals to fill out a list of bullet points. I believe it is the first book on this list where I specifically thought, “this is going to scratch that The Secret History itch for me.”

Spoilers: It did not scratch that The Secret History itch for me.

Because I am committed to the bit, I reread my review of The Bellwether Revivals. I am sorry to report that after rereading that post, I remember even less about The Bellwether Revivals than I did before reading it. If you’re thinking about reading The Bellwether Revivals, I recommend giving it a miss and instead reading the book I always get it mixed up with, i.e., Kate Racculia’s Bellweather Rhapsody, which is kinda like The Westing Game but for grownups.

So there you have it. I have spent a decade wishing that another book would make me feel the way The Secret History made me feel, to absolutely no avail. It was a futile hope all along. I have taken Christopher Yates’s Black Chalk off my TBR list in recognition of the fact that it’s never going to happen. I must just be content that The Secret History exists. I must not go chasing waterfalls. One waterfall must satiate me.

The post Books I Have Read in a Futile Effort to Chase That Secret History High appeared first on Reading the End.

The Bellwether Revivals is a case where my love for this type of genre — a group of friends, one who feels like an outsider in particular, coming to realize that there’s Danger in their Midst, and maybe Impending Doom — blinded me to the book’s flaws, and then when I sat down to write about it I talked myself out of it more and more. So let me start by saying what was good about the book:

I liked that Eden Bellwether, while he does do some quite sinister things over the course of the novel, doesn’t especially come across as dangerous. He believes that he can compose and play music that will have healing powers, healing anything from a cut hand to a broken leg to, possibly, a brain tumor. The scenes where he does this — carefully documented on camera as a good horror film would! — are wonderfully restrained. There are no incantations, just the playing of music and the laying on of hands. But there is, nevertheless, an air of menace about the whole thing, and about Eden. Though nothing particularly terrible happens, the reader feels that something has to, and will, give.

Very good indeed were the scenes with the Bellwether parents. Like many of the secondary characters — about whom more in a minute — they are poorly fleshed out as people. Still, the scenes where Oscar attends meals with them are deliciously uncomfortable in the way that it really is uncomfortable to eat dinner with someone else’s family when that family is weird in a way that’s completely unfamiliar to you. These scenes aren’t a major part of the novel.  I just liked them every time they showed up.

I’d have loved to have seen more stuff about the research done by Dr. Paulsen — one of Oscar’s patients at the care facility where he works — and Dr. Crest. The book didn’t need this to improve it. I just really liked Paulsen and Crest a lot. I liked it that they were both straightforward people who also had things to keep to themselves. Where many of the other secondary characters seemed to exist as satellites for the primary folks, Paulsen and Crest felt like they might realistically have lives outside of the Bellwethers.

Which brings me to the criticisms! Here they come. One, the secondary characters are barely people. Eden and Iris have three friends called Yin, Marcus, and Jane, who get a few nice descriptions — I quite liked this one of Jane —

She had a knack for diffusing the tension in a room. Oscar could see what the others liked about her: she was self-deprecating, constantly downplaying her intelligence and positioning herself as the slowest member of the group, when she might well have been the brightest of them all. She had a sense of humour that seemed naive, but he recognised it as something more than that. It was her way of forging her own identity within the group: an endearing, calculated dumbness.

–but who aren’t well-realized overall. At the end of the book I saw no reason for Oscar to keep hanging out with them, except that they had accepted him generously as an adjunct to their group. I couldn’t see what they had in common, because I didn’t know anything about them as people.

Another difficulty about the book is that you never want to believe in Eden. The author does a nice job letting you sit with the possibility that Eden can genuinely use music to heal people, although I think it’s ultimately made clear that he can’t and is nuts, but what you want — because it’s what Oscar wants — is to find out that Eden is nuts and see him get help. It would have been a much much more interesting book if Eden had spent more time engaging Oscar and trying to make him believe in what he can do.

What is that now? You think I am just saying that because it’s what Henry from The Secret History does so spectacularly well with Richard? NONSENSE. Except, yeah. That’s why I’m saying that. The Secret History is amazing, and its amazingness consists in how much you want to get behind Henry even though you know that buying into his version of events would make you sort of a sociopath.

On that note, who’s excited for Night Film? I mean The Goldfinch? Who’s excited for both? I am! 2013 is such an amazing year for books! So many authors beloved by me are publishing new books.

The post Review: The Bellwether Revivals, Benjamin Wood appeared first on Reading the End.