The Little Friend
What would have happened to Scout Finch without her father to influence her, and imagine her brother Jem being strung up by his neck when she was still a baby.
Now take Mick from 'The Heart is a Lonely Hunter', and imagine her loneliness without the respite of music, or anyone at all that she believed she could talk to.
'The Little Friend's Harriet Cleve Dusfrenes is a clear descendent of the heroines of Harper Lee and Carson McCullers, but Donna Tartt expands on her setting. She luxuriates in the details of her characters' past lives, their relationships with each other, and over everything is the heavy presence of memory.
Harriet is a literary creature, acting out biblical scenes with her friends and referencing 'Treasure Island' and 'Sherlock Holmes', piecing together and romanticizing her family's rich past through scattered heirloom furniture and photographs. It took a reference to 'Dark Shadows' well into the book for me to get a specific decade of when the story was taking place.
Tartt has made Harriet too precocious to be true in my opinion, but much about her, and the rest of the characters, of great and little importance, are authentic in their mannerisms and their motivations.
There is the matter of the ending, which may not be traditionally satisfying (I'll say nothing else) but, toying with it in my mind the rest of the night, I realized it was fitting. There's a point early on in the novel that sums up to me most what this book conveyed. Harriet begins her quest to find her brother's killers by asking her close family about the day it happened, breaking a strict taboo.
Harriet's great-aunt Libby instead tells her a story of something that happened several days beforehand. One morning, Libby, who had never married, walked back into her bedroom and discovered a man's hat on her bed. It was well-made, and on investigation, purchased from out of town.
Having heard this story many times before, Harriet is skeptical, but Libby insists it would have been impossible for someone to have sneaked into the house in the short time she'd left the room, they would have had to pass either her or her maid Odean. How can it be explained then, Harriet demands.
Some things happen in life, her aunt tells her, that can't ever be explained.
