Great novel, and it stops halfway.

There's a superb novel in here, and it stops around the halfway mark. Everything up to Bunny's death is close to perfect — the cold, the Greek, the awful flattery of being selected by strangers who have decided you're interesting. Everything afterwards is a procedural about six anxious young people managing a logistics problem, and the logistics aren't interesting.

Now the consensus, which says this concerns beauty and violence, the terrible allure of the aesthetic life. I don't think it is, and I'd say the text doesn't support it. Look at what Richard actually notices, sentence by sentence, and it's money. Every time. His shame isn't intellectual; it's the coat, the shoes, the lie about his father's oil interests, the winter he spends in an unheated warehouse because he cannot say aloud that he has nowhere to go. Hampden isn't a temple of the beautiful. It's an expensive place where nobody has to be employed and where studying a dead language for four years is something a person may simply choose to do. Take the money out of this novel and no plot remains, only a seminar.

Which is why Julian works as a figure and fails as a mind. He's a rich man's idea of a teacher, available only to students who can afford to be selected, and when pressure arrives he leaves. That's the sharpest observation in the novel, underlined so lightly that half the readers I know still speak of him fondly.

Neil's objection, and he makes it whenever this comes up, so let me put it in his words: the later chapters are meant to be flat. Guilt is boring. She's dramatising the tedium of getting away with it, that long grey stretch after the transgression when nothing happens except that everybody drinks more. I take it seriously. I do. But a novel dramatising tedium still needs to be readable while doing so, and there are runs here — the hotel, the hospital, the endless negotiation about what Cloke might have worked out — that read like minutes of a meeting. Dostoevsky spends the middle of Crime and Punishment on a man rotting in plain sight and never loosens his grip for a paragraph. It can be done. It isn't done here.

My other complaint is Camilla, who I maintain isn't a character so much as a description of an effect she has on men. Whenever she's on the page we learn what happens to the room; almost never what she'd like. Charles gets an interior. Henry certainly does. Francis has one and his is the strongest of the three. Camilla gets a haircut, a pair of ankles and a brother.

Here's what I'll concede, and it's substantial. That opening is one of the great openings in modern fiction. Telling you about the murder in the first paragraph and then making you desperate to arrive at it anyway takes enormous nerve, and almost nobody attempts it. Henry is a genuine creation, a man with the moral imagination of a nineteenth-century mathematician, calm in a fashion that keeps turning out to be worse than rage. Every scene improves while he's inside it, and the conversation where he explains what happened at the farmhouse is the finest writing Tartt has produced. I'd fight about that separately and at length.

I'll concede the atmospherics too, having been sniffy about everything after the murder. She is unbelievably good at cold. At the sound of a room with too few people in it. At the exact social physics of being the only person present who is pretending.

Six, then, and I know that's an aggressive number for a novel people love with their whole chest. Deborah has a university copy with three separate sets of annotations in different pens. She says I read it as a critic and never once as a nineteen-year-old, which is fair enough. I first opened it at twenty-two and even then I was taking notes on the class material.

I'd take correction on Camilla. Somebody tell me what she wants. Not what she withholds. What does she actually want?

EDIT: Neil says I've got the death wrong, that they don't drown him, they push him into a ravine on a walk, and that I've welded it onto the farmer from the bacchanal. He's right. I've had that wrong for years and stated it confidently in a pub more than once. It doesn't change the argument about the back half. It does change how loudly I get to make it.