by JULIET WATERS

In the mid-’90s, publicity shots of Donna Tartt showed an unnaturally pale twentysomething with dark glasses and black, severely bobbed hair. Rumour was she read too much and took herself too seriously. Her debut, The Secret History, a literary mystery about pretentious, overeducated brats at a private college, both enthralled and irritated critics. No one could deny her precocious talent, but she seemed too much the poseur. One expected her to keep turning out clever, well-written novels about the Gen-X elite until her shelf life expired at thirtysomething.

But she didn’t. She disappeared and has returned seven years later with The Little Friend, a big, scary, second novel. Once again, Tartt has her cursor perfectly aligned with the literary zeitgeist. This time, however, she’s written a mature, intensely readable classic.

The Little Friend is what Harry Potter and Lemony Snicket fans will be growing up to read when they hit the age to start delving into more serious literature. It’s also what all those adults who’ve been regressing to children’s lit have probably been missing: a novel that evokes the pure pleasure one felt the first time one discovered a character that really challenged one’s notion of individuality. Tartt has written a violent, gothic, rambling and often exquisitely subtle girl’s adventure story that reads as though the ghost of William Faulkner had been up all night reading Harriet the Spy. It’s much too long, and its ending is problematic to say the least. But these sins are easily redeemed by the character of Harriet Cleve Dufresnes.

No ordinary tomboy, Harriet is a haughty, irritating, smart-ass, 12-year-old bookworm with a macabre charisma that attracts a cult of younger boys in late ’70s Mississippi. She makes them play Crusades and Joan of Arc and act out scenes from the New Testament where she plays the role of Jesus. After a Last Supper of Ritz crackers and grape Fanta, Harriet’s disciples follow her to Gethsemane, located in her garden. “Here Harriet, as Jesus, was forced to undergo capture by the Romans—violent capture, more boisterous than the version of it rendered in the Gospels—and this was exciting enough; but the boys mainly loved Gethsemane because it was played under the tree her brother was murdered in.”

When Harriet was six months old, her nine-year-old brother, Robin—the golden child of her white, formerly aristocratic, Southern family—was lynched. Hanged from the black-tupelo tree in their backyard, his murder has never been solved. Neither, throughout Harriet’s young life, has it ever been discussed.

In a family whose identity was once firmly rooted in its telling and retelling of its eccentric, gloriously re-imagined history, Robin’s death is a black hole, “Its horror was not subject to repair or permutation by any of the narrative devices that the Cleves knew.” In this symbolic reversal of southern style, injustice, privilege and power are no buffer against an unavenged, incomprehensible death.

Though there are few pop-cultural references in The Little Friend, Harriet is the perfect mixture of naïveté and rage emerging from the first blossoms of punk nihilism. She decides to avenge her brother’s death, focusing on the most likely perpetrator, Danny Ratliff, scion of a trailer-trash dynasty of criminals and drug dealers. Her best friend, Hely Pemberton, suggests putting sugar in the gas tank of Danny’s Trans-Am. Harriet decides instead to kill him.

The Little Friend alternates between the brutal, tragicomic lives of the Cleves and the Ratliffs. Many readers will find the novel too meandering by far. Few will find its ending satisfying. But, in the final analysis, Tartt does much more than present a complex, rich, unique character. She presents a complex, rich, unique time and place that seems many, many years from being tied up and disposed of as efficiently as some of its victims. :

The Little Friend by Donna Tartt, Knopf, hc, 555pp, $40