The Secret History: A-

Comparisons need apply between Donna Tartt's debut 1992 novel The Secret History and Marisha Pessl's debut 2006 novel Special Topics in Calamity Physics. Both feature, most obviously, the same central character structure: an outsider (in Pessl's case, driven by her intellectual superiority, while in Tartt's, financial inferiority) is driven into a romanticized friendship with a close-knit group of precocious young adults and mentored by a glamorously reclusive (and enigmatic) teacher of some glamorously reclusive (and enigmatic) subject; Pessl chose the far more blithe and witty target of film - an area of study rife with options for her razor-sharp pen - while Tartt chooses Classics (the study of Ancient Greece: language, literature, politics, religous rituals and all), a more gothically enamored choice and one that immediately sets a clear dichotomy between her more grave, more psychological, thriller and Pessl's shinier, swifter-moving, twist.

Still, the unnerving similarities do persist. Both plots eventually deal with murder and both eventually, more or less, turn a sharply-toned eye onto it's own protagonists - striving, and achieving to two wildly different degrees, for an air of moral ambiguity. And, too, both Tartt and Pessl's prose glitters on various occasions with the sheer transcendant light of its erudite capability. As it were, after a thorough early preview of the book (I'd plowed through 200 of the 550 pages), I still found the connections between the two too obvious to pass up; I was all ready to declare Physics a subtle - and silent - deconstruction of History's grave, suspenseful, pretension.

But, and after much thoughtful and slowly-paced narrative and interaction, I came to determine that The Secret History is a far more focused and chilling dissection of the discrepancies between Intellectualism and Romanticism; that is, the many differences caused when the world of six sparklingly Hampden college students is forced to collide with a world dark, and squirming, with conspiracy and betrayal and wrenching introspection.

And it all began with Dionysus.

When Richard Pappin discovers a small Northeastern elite college - the aforementioned Hampden - and subsequently is indoctrinated into a small clique of Greek fanatics (among them: wintery intellecutal Henry; broadly charismatic and callow Bunny; grandly dramatic, and gay, Francis; and the twins - Charles and Camilla - a pair of introverted and "compassionate" humans among such scholars), he is intertwined in a conspiracy to cover the mess created when Henry & Co. try to re-create the orgiastic rites of Dionysus, god of wine and sex. Richard, also the narrator, lets us in on the conspiracy from the first page - when he reveals their murder of Bunny - but much of the novel is spent on the slow build-up of tensions that created such a horrific fiasco and the immediate here-after: how an act affects Richard's new group of friends and himself.

Does it sound slow? Then it is; Tartt has a masterful sense of plot construction (she reveals her hair-line fractures of character and twist with maximum arch drama) but none for pacing and only a modicum of it for characters (though the entire group has more individuality than Ms. Pesshl mustered for the "Bluebloods"). Still, History has a slow-burn chill that seeps into you and - in the daring final 100 pages of never-ending climax - finally grabs and shakes you to the core. The epilogue has a jolting clinical style but this debut has a cutting clarity of purpose and confidence that, when it was finally revealed, hit me like a blast of cold, steely, well-written and textured talent. Bravo.