I was somewhat nervous coming back to this on the other side of university (not that I'm fully on the other side: but I've made it through undergrad at least), because a great deal of its romance for me, and, I think, for the tiktok sect who've picked it up recently, is its collegic intrigue. There is a certain type of person who wants to be Richard Papen, to go to smart pretentious institutions and know smart pretentious people, and I was one of them until I was nastily kneecapped with disillusion (if nothing else, a lot of the people at this kind of place aren't that smart: Tartt did try to warn me). Which is all to say that TSH painted to an image of what college and its people would be, and the kind of dreamy, decadant sentences they would speak in, one that might just have appealed most of all to my own naivety. Only, I think, that's a total discredit to what the book's doing. At some point over the last 7 or 8 years, I'd fallen for the aestheticisation, and forgotten that the story's doing something a lot more sprawling, complex, interesting than the dark academia mood boards suggest. It feels very true, in some very broad ways, and deeply deeply placed. I have limited patience for contemporary writing, because it's all so stylistically bland. That is, bland is the style. And it's boring. TSH is dripping with voice. It's wonderful. It's adorned with detail, thing, occasion. That means it's long, and it should be: some books should be long. I liked it, and I liked the audiobook recording too, even.