The secret history, by Donna Tartt

I missed reading this when it came out and was very popular, so having enjoyed her The goldfinch, I decided it would make a good vacation read.  I found it much less engaging but persevered even though I found it hard to feel much for most of the characters.  The first pages reveal that the narrator and his college friends were involved in the death of one of their group, but how this happened and why takes a very long prologue.  The second half of the book is tauter and keeps the pages turning.  Richard Papin, the narrator, comes from a loveless lower middle-class home in California.  He is admitted on scholarship to a prestigious liberal arts college in scenic New England, where he falls in with a  group of effete and pretentious students who are tutored by a charismatic classics professor.  He studied Greek when younger as an aid to treating his early dyslexia, so is able to hold his own a bit in that language and manages to become a member of this closed society.  The fact that he comes from “the Golden State” impresses his new friends who assume his home life includes swimming pools and sightings of famous people.  But they are a pretty icky group with hints of sexual perversion – dressing eccentrically, talking to each other in Greek and Latin, and toying with engaging in a modern Bacchanal.  At the latter, they succeed all too well.  Left a bad taste in my mouth.  503 pp.