Donna Tartt is best known for her first and third novels, The Secret History and The Goldfinch. But her second novel, The Little Friend, stayed with me over the years in a way the other two did not. It’s the story of Harriet Dufresnes, a 12-year-old girl in 1970s Mississippi, bent on solving the mystery of her brother’s death when she was an infant. The story is filled with vivid, hallucinatory scenes and characters who illustrate the elusiveness of truth, in life and memory both.

Because he had been such an engaging little stray of a boy, and because his whims and peculiarities were precisely why they had all loved him so, in their reconstructions the impulsive quickness of the living Robin came through in places almost painfully clear… But this clarity was deceptive... for in other places the story was worn nearly transparent, radiant but oddly featureless, as the lives of saints sometimes are.

"How Robin would have loved this!" the aunts used to say fondly. "How Robin would have laughed!" In truth, Robin had been a giddy, fickle child - somber at odd moments, practically hysterical at others - and, in life, this unpredictability had been a great part of his charm. But his younger sisters, who had never in any proper sense known him at all, nonetheless grew up certain of their dead brother's favorite color (red); his favorite book (The Wind in the Willows) and his favorite character in it (Mr. Toad); his favorite flavor of ice cream (chocolate) and his favorite baseball team (the Cardinals) and a thousand other things which they - being living children, and preferring chocolate ice cream one week and peach the next - were not even sure they knew about themselves. Consequently their relationship with their dead brother was of the most intimate sort, his strong, bright, immutable character shining changelessly against the vagueness and vacillation of their own characters, and the characters of people that they knew; and they grew up believing that this was due to some rare, angelic incandescence of nature on Robin's part, and not at all to the fact that he was dead.

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Links:

• Donna Tartt audio interview with Lynn Neary, NPR Talk of the Nation, November 5, 2002

  
  

• Quotes from The Little Friend - Goodreads

This post is part of The American 250, a series featuring 250 objects made by Americans, located in America, in honor of the country's 250th anniversary. 250 words on 250 works, from January 1 to December 31, 2026.

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