Donna Tartt’s prose is my drug of choice, yet her second offering, “The Little Friend” turned the tables on me, weaving a tale that’s as intoxicating as it is unsettling. Tartt doesn’t shy away from diving deep into the Southern Gothic, pulling us into a Mississippi town of the 1970s, teeming with the kind of turmoil and tragedy that sticks to your ribs long after you’ve turned the last page.
“The Little Friend” is a Southern novel, and a coming-of-age (my favorite oeuvre!) novel to boot, partaking of two genres that all too often devolve to cliché or cartoon; Tartt resorts to neither. Her heroine, Harriet Cleve Dufresne, who’s wise beyond her years and tough as nails, lives in a small Mississippi town sometime in the late 1970s. Her mother barely functions, a vague, moping presence ever since Harriet’s older brother, Robin, was found hanged from a tree at the age of 9, the victim of an unknown killer, shortly after Harriet was born. Her father spends most of his time in Nashville, where he keeps a clandestine mistress. Harriet and her sister Allison, 4 at the time of Robin’s murder, have been raised mostly by their grandmother, Edie, her three sisters and the family’s black maid.
Harriett is on a quest, detective-style, to unravel the knot of her brother’s death, a mystery wrapped in the town’s silence and secrets. Tartt crafts her tale with precision, embedding us in a world where the parade of horrors seems endless: animal abuse, animal death, animal neglect, child abuse, child death, child neglect, racism, drug abuse, meth dealers, white supremacy…and on and on.
It’s a lot, honestly. The weight of the world Tartt paints is heavy with the dark realities of human existence, compounded by the meth epidemic quietly ravaging the community’s core. Danny Ratliff, the amphetamine shadow lurking in Harriet’s investigation, embodies the meth crisis that’s not just fiction but a reflection of the struggles Mississippi continues to face. The state battles a meth problem that’s as persistent and pervasive as the kudzu climbing over its landscape, a fight that seems Sisyphean at times.
While Tartt’s narrative plunges us into the depths of these challenges, my mind couldn’t help but wander to the potential paths not taken. Mississippi, with its stringent stance against psychedelics like psilocybin, misses out on the burgeoning conversation about alternative treatments for addiction. Psilocybin remains tucked away under the label of a Schedule I controlled substance, a simple act of cultivation of psilocybin mushrooms, our Earth-given privilege, is classified as a felony, despite growing evidence of its potential to break the chains of addiction for many. This disconnect between what could be a transformative approach to substance abuse and the state’s hardline policies only adds another layer of tragedy to the already complex tapestry Tartt weaves. Imagine a scenario where Danny, instead of descending further into the meth abyss, encounters psilocybin mushrooms. It’s a thought experiment that not only challenges our perceptions of drug use and addiction but also reflects on the potential for change in how society addresses these issues.
Listening to Tartt narrate the book on Audible brought a new dimension to the story, her Southern drawl wrapping around each character and scene with an authenticity that’s hard to come by. It’s a performance that elevates the narrative, making the journey through the dark corridors of her novel a bit more bearable, even when the content itself pulls no punches.
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