Acclaim for Donna Tartt’s
THE LITTLE FRIEND
W. H. Smith Literary Award Winner
Shortlisted for the Orange Prize
“The work of a born storyteller … wonderfully ambitious.”
—The Boston Globe
“[Tartt] is simply a much stronger, richer, deeper writer than just about any other realist of her generation, Southern or not.”
—Chicago Tribune
“I read it in a single day because I couldn’t stop.… Her artistry is flawless.”
—Dail Willis, The Baltimore Sun
“A powerhouse story.… From its darkly enticing opening … we are held spellbound.… Tartt is a sophisticated yarn-spinner.… Breathtaking.”
—Elle
“A terrific story.… Tartt etches each of these characters with indelible assurance.”
—Newsweek
“A lush and old-fashioned evening gown of a book.… The prose is rich, elaborate, and elegantly controlled.”
—O, The Oprah Magazine
“If you don’t fall smack-bang in love with Harriet Cleve Dufresnes, you’ve got a cement heart.… Tartt makes fiction read like fact.… Her writing is great like a song. You memorize it without realizing.”
—Financial Times
“An emotional and romantic page-turner.… Engrossing.… The reader is drawn … immediately into the lives of these characters.”
—Vogue
“Tartt generates a narrative of nearly unbearable tension as she poses questions of ethics and morality.… This is the novel we’ve been waiting for.”
—The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
“The Little Friend is a sprawling story of vengeance, with few wasted words told in a rich, controlled voice that can come only from long effort, which doesn’t show ostentatiously on the page.”
—Time
“A dark tale of lost innocence populated by a cast of characters that would make Flannery O’Connor proud.”
—People
“A rich study of race, class and family with a sprawling cast of characters.”
—The Economist
“A gut-thumping story of a little girl seeking a measure of understanding and well-deserved revenge.… A deeper exploration of the dark manner in which the past never leaves us alone.”
—Esquire
“This is a true Southern novel—rooted in and wrung out of a background that allows it to qualify as a very fine book.”
—New York Daily News
“The dense, steamy mood of a small-town Mississippi summer blends together beautifully with Tartt’s extraordinarily patient evocation of the inwardness of twelve-year-old Harriet Cleve.… Tartt writes with confident mastery.… A carefully layered portrait of a remarkable girl’s chrysalis summer.”
—Sven Birkerts, Book
Books by Donna Tartt
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The Secret History
The Little Friend
FIRST VINTAGE CONTEMPORARIES EDITION, OCTOBER 2003
Copyright © 2002 by Donna Tartt
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 2002.
Vintage is a registered trademark and Vintage Contemporaries and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to Marlowe & Company for permission to reprint excerpts from A Treasury of African Folklore by Harold Courlander. Copyright © 1996 by Harold Courlander. Reprinted by permission of Marlowe & Company.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the Knopf edition as follows:
Tartt, Donna.
The little friend / Donna Tartt.—1st ed.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-307-87348-4
1. Murder victims’ families—Fiction. 2. Brothers—Death—Fiction. 3. Mississippi—Fiction.
4. Sisters—Fiction. 5. Revenge—Fiction. 6. Girls—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3570.A657 L58 2002
813′.54—dc21 2002066878
www.vintagebooks.com
v3.1
For Neal
The slenderest knowledge that may be obtained of the highest things is more desirable than the most certain knowledge obtained of lesser things.
—SAINT THOMAS AQUINAS,
SUMMA THEOLOGICA I, 1, 5 AD 1
——
Ladies and gentlemen, I am now locked up in a handcuff that has taken a British mechanic five years to make. I do not know whether I am going to get out of it or not, but I can assure you I am going to do my best.
—HARRY HOUDINI, LONDON HIPPODROME,
SAINT PATRICK’S DAY, 1904
CONTENTS
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Cover
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Prologue
Chapter One The Dead Cat
Chapter Two The Blackbird
Chapter Three The Pool Hall
Chapter Four The Mission
Chapter Five The Red Gloves
Chapter Six The Funeral
Chapter Seven The Tower
Acknowledgments
Prologue
____
For the rest of her life, Charlotte Cleve would blame herself for her son’s death because she had decided to have the Mother’s Day dinner at six in the evening instead of noon, after church, which is when the Cleves usually had it. Dissatisfaction had been expressed by the elder Cleves at the new arrangement; and while this mainly had to do with suspicion of innovation, on principle, Charlotte felt that she should have paid attention to the undercurrent of grumbling, that it had been a slight but ominous warning of what was to come; a warning which, though obscure even in hindsight, was perhaps as good as any we can ever hope to receive in this life.
Though the Cleves loved to recount among themselves even the minor events of their family history—repeating word for word, with stylized narrative and rhetorical interruptions, entire deathbed scenes, or marriage proposals that had occurred a hundred years before—the events of this terrible Mother’s Day were never discussed. They were not discussed even in covert groups of two, brought together by a long car trip or by insomnia in a late-night kitchen; and this was unusual, because these family discussions were how the Cleves made sense of the world. Even the cruelest and most random disasters—the death, by fire, of one of Charlotte’s infant cousins; the hunting accident in which Charlotte’s uncle had died while she was still in grammar school—were constantly rehearsed among them, her grandmother’s gentle voice and her mother’s stern one merging harmoniously with her grandfather’s baritone and the babble of her aunts, and certain ornamental bits, improvised by daring soloists, eagerly seized upon and elaborated by the chorus, until finally, by group effort, they arrived together at a single song; a song which was then memorized, and sung by the entire company again and again, which slowly eroded memory and came to take the place of truth: the angry fireman, failing in his efforts to resuscitate the tiny body, transmuted sweetly into a weeping one; the moping bird dog, puzzled for several weeks by her master’s death, recast as the grief-stricken Queenie of family legend, who searched relentlessly for her beloved throughout the house and howled, inconsolable, in her pen all night; who barked in joyous welcome whenever the dear ghost approached in the yard, a ghost that only she could perceive. “Dogs can see things that we can’t,” Charlotte’s aunt Tat always intoned, on cue, at the proper moment in the story. She was something of a mystic and the ghost was her innovation.