God of Illusion is the first novel by Donna Tartt, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for The Goldfinch. The novel was renamed later “The Secret History,” and published in September 1992. 

Bret Easton Ellis was Donna Tartt’s classmate at Bennington. She dedicated The Secret History to him.

Do you remember Bret Easton Ellis? In his masterpiece, “American Psycho,” he delines the profile of a beautiful remorseless narcissist yuppie killer. You might appreciate the purity of his prose: “Because of this excursion I have no time for a morning workout, and since I overslept, owing to a late-night–predawn coke binge with Charles Griffin and Hilton Ashbury that started innocently enough at a magazine party none of us were invited to at M.K. and ended at my automated teller sometime around five, I’ve missed The Patty Winters Show which actually was a repeat of an interview with the President, so it doesn’t really matter, I guess.

I’m tense, my hair is slicked back, Wayfarers on, my skull is aching, I have a cigar—unlit—clenched between my teeth, am wearing a black Armani suit, a white cotton Armani shirt, and a silk tie, also by Armani. I look sharp but my stomach is doing flip-flops, my brain is churning.“

God of Illusions (spoiler alert) is set in New England. The novel recounts the story of a chummy group of six classics students at Hampden College, a small, liberal college located in Vermont.

The protagonist, Richard Papen leaves California for Hampden to study Ancient Greek. 

Richard succeeds in enrolling in the class of Classic professor, Julian Morrow. The group is elitist and small, made by twins Charles and Camilla Macaulay; Francis Abernathy, whose country home becomes a refuge for the group; Henry Winter, an intellectual with a passion for Homer and Plato; and Edmund “Bunny” Corcoran, a narrow-minded pretentious non-rich guy.

Henry hangs out, during winter break, with Bundy in Rome while Richard -with no money- spends it in a frozen warehouse in Vermont. Richard nearly dies from hypothermia but is rescued by Henry, who returns alone from Italy and takes him to the hospital.

Bunny and Richard learn that during a bacchanal from which they were excluded, Henry inadvertently killed a farmer near Francis’s country farm. Bunny starts blackmailing the group asking for an increasingly bigger amount of money. The group resolves to kill Bunny, feeling the weight of meeting Bunny’s demands.

While he is hiking along with the others Henry pushes him into a ravine killing him.

The group joins the search parties for Bunny and, when finally the body is found, attends his funeral in order to avoid suspicion.

Furthermore, Richard discovers that Henry killed the farmer by cutting open his stomach and not in an accident. 

The group struggles to maintain its unity when the professor, Julian Morrow, finds out about Bunny’s murder and confronts the group. But instead of reporting the crime to the authorities, Julian leaves the faculty at Hampden College and never returns.

The novel continues with Henry’s suicide and the relation between the twins falling apart. Charles accidentally shoots Richard in the stomach but Henry is blamed by the police report.

The group crumbles, everybody finds his own way out. 

Richard becomes a solitary academic with an unanswered love for Camilla.  

I recall asking Bart if he read the book and he said no.  

Ma videmus nunc per speculum et in aenigmate e la verità, prima che faccia a faccia, si manifesta a tratti (ahi, quanto illeggibili) nell’errore del mondo, così che dobbiamo compitarne i fedeli segnacoli, anche là dove ci appaiono oscuri e quasi intessuti di una volontà del tutto intesa al male.(*)

(*) Umberto Eco, Il nome della Rosa, Bompiani, Milano 1980