The New Canon is a regular feature, contributed by Ted Gioia, focusing on great works of fiction published since 1985. These books represent the finest literature of the current era, and are gaining recognition as the new classics of our time. In this installment of The New Canon, Gioia looks at The Secret History by Donna Tartt.

In Alfred Hitchcock’s film Rope (1948), based in part on the Leopold and Loeb murder case of 1924, two students are inspired by the teachings of a Nietzschean prep school housemaster (played by James Stewart in perhaps his most atypical role) to commit a murder. In their zeal to go “beyond good and evil,” they strangle a former classmate, and almost flaunt the evidence to enhance their sense of superiority. Much of the horror in this film comes from the strange motivation of the killers - after all, who commits murder as part of an intellectual quest for self-actualization?

Donna Tartt wrestles with a very similar scenario in her unconventional novel The Secret History, a murder mystery in reverse which (like Hitchcock's film) starts with the crime, and then tantalizes the audience not with "who done it" but rather the more unsettling question of why. Tartt's novel starts in medias res with four friends pushing a classmate off a precipice to his death. The rest of the novel unravels the convoluted steps by which these college students came to commit this crime, and charts the chilling aftermath of the murder.

The underlying inspiration for the act in this instance comes not from a Nietzschean teacher, but rather via the influence of a soft-spoken and kindly professor of classics, who teaches these five students ancient Greek. His relationship with this small group of undergraduates develops into an unhealthy cult of personality with a distinctively pagan flavor. By gradual steps his coterie of followers become obsessed with bacchanalian rites, a path which inevitably leads to a vicious spiral of bloodshed.

There is much to admire in Tartt’s novel, but it is especially laudable for how persuasively she chronicles the steps from studying classics to committing murder. This is a difficult transition to relate in a believable manner, and all the more difficult given Tartt’s decision to tell the story from the perspective of one of the most genial of the conspirators. Her story could easily come across as implausible — or even risible — in its recreation of Dionysian rites on a Vermont college campus, and its attempt to convince us that a mild-mannered transfer student with a taste for ancient languages can evolve, through a series of almost random events, into a killer. Yet convince us she does, and the intimacy with which Tartt brings her readers into the psychological miasma of the unfolding plot is one of the most compelling features of The Secret History.