Blew my expectations out of the water with how disappointing the characters were. Having heard about this book via dark academia, I was hoping for a slightly tighter If We Were Villains. What I got was a front row seat to the rot of self-delusion.

Tartt comes closest to stating her thesis when one character says "Beauty, unless she is wed to something more meaningful, is always superficial". Even beauty itself does not escape this empty romanticisation, from Julian and Henry's early exchange of "What is beauty?" "Terror." to the first sentence Richard ever learned in Greek being "χαλεπὰ τὰ καλά... Beauty is harsh". These sentiments are intriguing, but characters never posit an explanation of this juxtaposition or what it means for their lives. When pressed, Henry only remarks vacuously that "anything is grand if its done at a large enough scale".

Once crafted, these beautiful images serve as disguises: Francis admits that he "tend[s] to equate physical beauty with qualities with which it has absolutely nothing to do" while Richard writes of his own "fatal tendency to try to make interesting people good", and that "one of Julian's most attractive qualities is his inability to see anything in its true light ... maybe one of my most attractive qualities as well". Henry plants roses in the same garden that homes ferns he picked the day they

killed Bunny

. Richard is capable of sober moments, once calling

Bunny's murder

a "selfish, basically evil act" and sometimes poking holes in Henry's 'logic', but by the end of the novel he is

comfortably back at his delusion, romanticising Jacobean plays as "trapdoors to something beautiful and wicked that trickled beneath the surface of morality"

. Since the beauty-hunting Richard narrates the tale, the entire book threatens to be such a trapdoor to the reader if they allow themselves to be swept up as he is; just look at the dark academia 'aesthetic'.

This friend group is also constantly abusing any substance they can get their hands on with a wantonness that betrays utter horror that they might have to be themselves for a while.

There is a vindictive joy in seeing the beautiful masks crack. For the reader, their morality comes into question with the

Bacchanalia confession wherein they dismiss the innocent, murdered farmer as no great intellect. Delusions of competence quickly follow as they fall apart in the aftermath of their crimes. Henry spends months on an improbable assassination-by-mushroom plan, only to admit in annoyance hours after murdering Bunny that he doesn't know how police investigations work. He also records the initial murder in a diary

.
 
The characters are slower to see these cracks. Francis realises during the

investigation "it's not that we're so smart, it's just that we don't look like we did it",

Charles bemoans

Henry being more worried "if Homer would make a better impression than Thomas Aquinas" while he diverts the cops' suspicions

, and the book is almost over before Richard

likens Henry and Charles fighting to "walking into the cockpit of a plane and finding the pilot and co-pilot passed out drunk".

I feared Secret History would be rich kid apologia but they are out of touch to the point of absurdism. After accidentally

killing the farmer

, Henry has them perform a

pig's blood cleansing ceremony

. Camilla thinks it works.

Bunny is the only character who can

spot a wavering mask early and consistently. Alchoholism, homosexuality, incest, Julian's selective blindness - all are proven astute, yet they're delivered insultingly enough to shock a court jester. Placing him in the role of truth-teller, usually reserved for a Holmsian savant or wide-eyed child, was a masterful stroke by Tartt to confer onto him both the competency to make him a threat and the innocence to prevent us from siding with his murderers comfortably.

Throughout the book, Camilla is an enigma beneath her beauty. Richard repeatedly describes her attractive features as "boyish" or "masculine", her emotions upon seeing

Charles' disintegration

surprise the entire cast, and her motive for

being with Henry blurs from protection from Charles into love

depending on when she's asked. She is never

brought as low as the others (even Henry is cowed in confessing to Julian)

so we never see her truly vulnerable, only superficially. Since Judy Poovey and Sophie Dearbold are genuine and scrutable, I take this masculine opacity, a mix of Charles and Henry's most alluring traits to Richard, to be the only way Richard knows to imbibe Camilla with the substance he imagines beneath her beauty.

Henry's greatest desire being "to live without thinking" is a cruel joke given his academic preoccupation with beautiful ideals.

He claims to be living this way as part of a philosophical argument while hand-polishing the leaves of a rare rosebush. I can't think of a single instance of him acting on a whim. Furthermore, he speaks of his truly thoughtless acts with scorn, not appreciation, and his worst such mistake, letting Julian see the truth of Bunny's accusation letter, marks the beginning of his end. Henry is a hypocrite, calling death the "mother of beauty" yet also describing his "colourless" world before that night as "dead".  He is Richard's snowstorm saviour and his friends' Corcoran tank but also the one who prompted them to two murders, then killed himself as a hasty sacrifice, complete with a declaration of love. His invigoration following the "most important night of [his] life" (read: the murder of an innocent) is not thanks to love or friends worth dying for, but the drama of violence - the opportunity to LARP a Greek tragedy. As Richard says of his motivation for suicide, "he felt the need to make a noble gesture".

Richard's inability to craft an entrancing mask, due to insecurities about his background, renders him forever the outsider.

Henry assures him they found him mysterious, but even when this is shucked, he is often the last to learn things, he is excluded from their entangled sex lives, and he lives apart from them, on campus. Richard feels remorse and wretchedness over Bunny at various times long after the murder but only the thought that Henry had manipulated him into their group to serve as patsy makes him break out into a cold sweat immediately.

Consequently, the saddest part of the entire book to me is

Richard getting shot. His neglectful childhood and all the little ways his wealthy friends thoughtlessly reduce him have been building for so long that the reader is practically gleeful when the bullet hits. Surely, finally, his friends will fuss over him now, but no. Charles shot him accidentally. No-one notices until he declares it and even then -  "somehow, this did not elicit the dramatic response I expected" - there is literally not a single on-page reaction before the scene moves on and Henry's suicide steals the show. His most significant hospital visitor is the ghost of Henry he imagines. It pairs pity with the disgust we feel at his choice of friends and plants the uneasy suspicion that we might be just as weak in his shoes.

Overall, this is a book where everyone gets what they deserve but you aren't exactly happy about it. I love most of these characters as much as I loathe them; the only one I cannot excuse is

Julian, who has the cleanest hands.

More than anything, I'm reminded of the Great Gatsby, not just for its outsider narrator, but for its frustrated condemnation of these silver-spooned scions as "careless people". And to anyone who idealises this Bacchanalian nightmare of a friend group, just do shrooms like a normal college kid.

Finally, I only recommend the audiobook if you want to hear how the author intended sentence emphasis to fall. Although I grew to like the author's voice and accent, it takes a lot of adjusting to feel it belongs to Richard, and the Bunny and Julian voices could have come out of a pair of muppets.