The Nature of Things

Throughout much of Donna Tartt's 2002 book, The Little Friend , I kept wondering, where is she going with this? Is this a murder mystery? A coming of age tale? A childhood adventure a la Scout/Jem/Dill of To Kill a Mockingbird ? And if it is, where and who is their Boo Radley? In the end, it seemed to me that it was all of those things and none of them. In truth, the writer didn't really care so much about the death of nine-year-old Robin Cleve Dufresnes and how his body came to be hanging from a tree in the family's yard in the river town of Alexandria, Mississippi. The mystery of the death and who was responsible were never explained, but, by focusing on that, Tartt was really exploring relationships, how the death affected those left behind, and the way of life of those people. We visit Alexandria twelve years after the death. Harriet Dufresnes, the youngest member of the family, was just a baby when her brother died. Now she is twelve years old and obsessed with findin...