Donna Tartt. The Little Friend. New York: Knopf, 2002. 555 pp.
Set in the 1970s in a small town in the Deep South of Mississippi, Donna Tartt's The Little Friend follows the search for the murderer of nine-year-old Robin Cleve Dufresnes, found hung to death in the garden on Mother's Day. The protagonist of this often cruel, violent and graphic novel, intended for adults but told from the perspective of children, is Robin's sister Harriet, one when he was killed and twelve when the story opens. The novel pits the Old South against the New South in the two central families; the Cleves and the Ratliffs. The former includes Harriet and her slower, older sister Adele. Her family has abandoned the family for Tennessee and her mother has retreated into a drug-induced netherworld, blaming herself for her son's death: "Charlotte Cleve would blame herself for her son's death because she had decided to have Mother's Day dinner at six in the evening rather than noon, after church, which is when the Cleves usually had it" (Tartt 1). Also in the Cleve household is maternal grandmother, Edie, and Harriet's three spinster great-aunts, Libby, Tat and Adelaide.
Pitted against the Cleves - who have just moved to regular house in town from their plantation "Tribulation" - is the white-trash Ratliff family, comprised of primarily criminal brothers (Tartt 43). The paranoid Farish, the zealous preacher Eugene, and the speed-freak Danny are the Ratliff brothers whom run a methamphetamine factory on the outskirts of town. Representing the white-trash new South, the Cleves deal with the dysfunction the death of Robin brings and with adjusting to an era of few aristocratic pretensions. With no evidence to her claim, Harriet determines Danny murdered Robin and solicits the aid of her friend Hely to help her. Her quest will put her in mortal danger, since the Ratliffs are capable of the most heinous of crimes.
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