The Little Friend - Reception

Reception

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.

A. O. Scott reviewed for The New York Times:

What this all adds up to is a tragic, fever-dream realism. Though the world Harriet discovers is unquestionably haunted, there is nothing magical about it, or about the furious, lyrical rationality of Tartt's voice. Her book is a ruthlessly precise reckoning of the world as it is -- drab, ugly, scary, inconclusive -- filtered through the bright colors and impossible demands of childhood perception. It grips you like a fairy tale, but denies you the consoling assurance that it's all just make-believe. Comparisons, in any case, are beside the point. This novel may be a hothouse flower, but like that fatal black tupelo tree, it has its own authority, its own darkness. This was the hallmark of Harriet's touch, Hely reflects. She could scare the daylights out of you, and you weren't even sure why. Harriet's gift is also Tartt's. The Little Friend might be described as a young-adult novel for grown-ups, since it can carry us back to the breathless state of adolescent literary discovery, when we read to be terrified beyond measure and, through our terror, to try to figure out the world and our place in it.

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.