Donna Tartt - The Little Friend

W. H. Smith Literary Award Winner
Shortlisted for the Orange Prize

The work of a born storyteller wonderfully ambitious.

The Boston Globe

[Tartt] is simply a much stronger, richer, deeper writer than just about any other realist of her generation, Southern or not.

Chicago Tribune

I read it in a single day because I couldnt stop. Her artistry is flawless.

Dail Willis, The Baltimore Sun

A powerhouse story. From its darkly enticing opening we are held spellbound. Tartt is a sophisticated yarn-spinner. Breathtaking.

Elle

A terrific story. Tartt etches each of these characters with indelible assurance.

Newsweek

A lush and old-fashioned evening gown of a book. The prose is rich, elaborate, and elegantly controlled.

O, The Oprah Magazine

If you dont fall smack-bang in love with Harriet Cleve Dufresnes, youve got a cement heart. Tartt makes fiction read like fact. Her writing is great like a song. You memorize it without realizing.

Financial Times

An emotional and romantic page-turner. Engrossing. The reader is drawn immediately into the lives of these characters.

Vogue

Tartt generates a narrative of nearly unbearable tension as she poses questions of ethics and morality. This is the novel weve been waiting for.

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

The Little Friend is a sprawling story of vengeance, with few wasted words told in a rich, controlled voice that can come only from long effort, which doesnt show ostentatiously on the page.

Time

A dark tale of lost innocence populated by a cast of characters that would make Flannery OConnor proud.

People

A rich study of race, class and family with a sprawling cast of characters.

The Economist

A gut-thumping story of a little girl seeking a measure of understanding and well-deserved revenge. A deeper exploration of the dark manner in which the past never leaves us alone.

Esquire

This is a true Southern novelrooted in and wrung out of a background that allows it to qualify as a very fine book.

New York Daily News

The dense, steamy mood of a small-town Mississippi summer blends together beautifully with Tartts extraordinarily patient evocation of the inwardness of twelve-year-old Harriet Cleve. Tartt writes with confident mastery. A carefully layered portrait of a remarkable girls chrysalis summer.

Sven Birkerts, Book

Books by Donna Tartt

The Secret History
The Little Friend

FIRST VINTAGE CONTEMPORARIES EDITION, OCTOBER 2003

Copyright 2002 by Donna Tartt

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 2002.

Vintage is a registered trademark and Vintage Contemporaries and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to Marlowe & Company for permission to reprint excerpts from A Treasury of African Folklore by Harold Courlander. Copyright 1996 by Harold Courlander. Reprinted by permission of Marlowe & Company.

The Library of Congress has cataloged the Knopf edition as follows:
Tartt, Donna.
The little friend / Donna Tartt.1st ed.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-307-87348-4
1. Murder victims familiesFiction. 2. BrothersDeathFiction. 3. MississippiFiction.
4. SistersFiction. 5. RevengeFiction. 6. GirlsFiction. I. Title.
PS3570.A657 L58 2002
813.54dc21 2002066878

www.vintagebooks.com

v3.1

For Neal

The slenderest knowledge that may be obtained of the highest things is more desirable than the most certain knowledge obtained of lesser things.

S AINT T HOMAS A QUINAS ,
S UMMA T HEOLOGICA I, 1, 5 AD 1

Ladies and gentlemen, I am now locked up in a handcuff that has taken a British mechanic five years to make. I do not know whether I am going to get out of it or not, but I can assure you I am going to do my best.

H ARRY H OUDINI , L ONDON H IPPODROME ,
S AINT P ATRICKS D AY , 1904

For the rest of her life, Charlotte Cleve would blame herself for her sons death because she had decided to have the Mothers Day dinner at six in the evening instead of noon, after church, which is when the Cleves usually had it. Dissatisfaction had been expressed by the elder Cleves at the new arrangement; and while this mainly had to do with suspicion of innovation, on principle, Charlotte felt that she should have paid attention to the undercurrent of grumbling, that it had been a slight but ominous warning of what was to come; a warning which, though obscure even in hindsight, was perhaps as good as any we can ever hope to receive in this life.

Though the Cleves loved to recount among themselves even the minor events of their family historyrepeating word for word, with stylized narrative and rhetorical interruptions, entire deathbed scenes, or marriage proposals that had occurred a hundred years beforethe events of this terrible Mothers Day were never discussed. They were not discussed even in covert groups of two, brought together by a long car trip or by insomnia in a late-night kitchen; and this was unusual, because these family discussions were how the Cleves made sense of the world. Even the cruelest and most random disastersthe death, by fire, of one of Charlottes infant cousins; the hunting accident in which Charlottes uncle had died while she was still in grammar schoolwere constantly rehearsed among them, her grandmothers gentle voice and her mothers stern one merging harmoniously with her grandfathers baritone and the babble of her aunts, and certain ornamental bits, improvised by daring soloists, eagerly seized upon and elaborated by the chorus, until finally, by group effort, they arrived together at a single song; a song which was then memorized, and sung by the entire company again and again, which slowly eroded memory and came to take the place of truth: the angry fireman, failing in his efforts to resuscitate the tiny body, transmuted sweetly into a weeping one; the moping bird dog, puzzled for several weeks by her masters death, recast as the grief-stricken Queenie of family legend, who searched relentlessly for her beloved throughout the house and howled, inconsolable, in her pen all night; who barked in joyous welcome whenever the dear ghost approached in the yard, a ghost that only she could perceive. Dogs can see things that we cant, Charlottes aunt Tat always intoned, on cue, at the proper moment in the story. She was something of a mystic and the ghost was her innovation.

But Robin: their dear little Robs. More than ten years later, his death remained an agony; there was no glossing any detail; its horror was not subject to repair or permutation by any of the narrative devices that the Cleves knew. Andsince this willful amnesia had kept Robins death from being translated into that sweet old family vernacular which smoothed even the bitterest mysteries into comfortable, comprehensible formthe memory of that days events had a chaotic, fragmented quality, bright mirror-shards of nightmare which flared at the smell of wisteria, the creaking of a clothes-line, a certain stormy cast of spring light.