The Little Friend

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The Little Friend
First edition cover designed by Chip Kidd
Author	Donna Tartt
Country	United States
Language	English
Publisher	Knopf
Publication date	October 22, 2002
Media type	Print (Hardcover and Paperback)
Pages	576 pp
ISBN	ISBN 0679439382

The Little Friend is the second novel by Donna Tartt, published in 2002, a decade after her first novel, The Secret History.

Superficially, The Little Friend is a mystery adventure, centered on a young girl, Harriet, living in Mississippi in the early 1970s and her implicit anxieties about the unexplained death of her brother Robin, who was killed by hanging in 1964 at the age of nine. ^[1] The dynamics of Harriet's extended family are a strong focus of the novel, as are the lifestyles and customs of contrasting Southerners.

In 2002, Tartt described it as "a frightening, scary book about children coming into contact with the world of adults in a frightening way... After The Secret History I wanted to write a different kind of book on every single level. I wanted to take on a completely different set of technical problems. The Secret History was all from the point of view of Richard, a single camera, but the new book is symphonic, like War And Peace. That's widely thought to be the most difficult form." ^[1]

Reviewing in the New Republic, Ruth Franklin introduced the major characters as she outlined the plot:

The prologue of The Little Friend describes the murder of nine-year-old Robin Cleve Dufresnes; or rather, it describes the circumstances surrounding Robin's murder, because the crime itself is witnessed only by his two sisters, the infant Harriet and the four-year-old Allison, who has repressed whatever she saw to such an extent that it appears in her dreams only as a white sheet. When the novel proper begins, twelve years later, that terrible day has hardly faded; as in The Secret History, the impact of a person on those close to him is far greater in death than it was in life. And again Tartt is obsessed with crimes that go unpunished: Robin's killing reverberates in the various acts of depravity that ripple throughout the book, from emotional betrayal to, finally, another murder.

Harriet and her sister have been raised largely by their grandmother Edie, a bevy of adoring great-aunts, and the family's longtime housekeeper, Ida Rhew. (Robin's death sent the girls' mother into a dreamy depression from which she has never awakened, and their father lives with a mistress in Nashville, returning home only at Christmas.) Harriet, who looks like a "small badger," is the sort of child who likes to read about Genghis Khan and Captain Scott and to stir up fights among her great-aunts by telling them what they really think of each other's Christmas gifts. But she, too, has grown up obsessed with her brother's death, which she blames for the disintegration of her family. Left to her own devices for the summer, she resolves to track down and punish Robin's killer, whom she decides, based on the most circumstantial indications, must be Danny Ratliff, a former classmate of Robin's who has sunk into a life of petty crime. As Harriet trails Danny around town (there are shades of Harriet the Spy here), waiting for the right moment to strike, he becomes equally obsessed with her, convinced that she is out to get him for an entirely different reason. ^[2]

The novel won the WH Smith Literary Award and was shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction in 2003. The jacket design is by Chip Kidd.