Donna Tartt's debut novel opens not with mystery but with confession — a confession rendered in the cool, donnish prose of someone who has long since made peace with what he has done. "The snow in the mountains was melting," Richard Papen tells us, "and Bunny had been dead for several weeks before we came to understand the gravity of our situation." This inversion of suspense — we know the outcome before we know the cause — is the novel's great formal gamble, and it pays off magnificently.

What Tartt has written is not, properly speaking, a thriller. It is a study in the aesthetics of moral failure, a portrait of a group of students so seduced by beauty and intellect that they lose all capacity for ordinary ethical feeling. The novel's central tension is not whether Julian Morrow's small classics coterie committed murder, but rather how — by what philosophical and psychological gradations — a circle of gifted young people came to believe that beauty could absolve them of consequence.

The Greek and Latin texts that Henry, Francis, Charles, Camilla, and the ill-fated Edmund "Bunny" Corcoran study under the enigmatic Julian Morrow are not window dressing. They form the novel's moral architecture. These are students who have taken Dionysus seriously — not as metaphor but as instruction. The Bacchanal they attempt in the Vermont wilderness, which ends in a blackout and a farmhand's death, is presented not as Gothic horror but as a kind of tragic accident of sincerity. They meant it. They believed. And that belief, Tartt suggests, is precisely what condemns them.

Richard Papen, our narrator, arrives at Hampden College from Plano, California — a detail Tartt deploys with quiet precision. He is an outsider, an aspirant, someone who has constructed a more romantic past for himself because the actual one seems too thin to bear. His fascination with the classics group is inseparable from his fascination with what they represent: a world of permanence, of significance, of the kind of beauty that seems to justify existence. He does not entirely understand what he is entering, and neither, for a long time, do we.

Much has been made of the novel's debt to Waugh — to Brideshead Revisited in particular — and the comparison is apt, if slightly misleading. Where Waugh mourns a lost aristocratic England with genuine ambivalence, Tartt regards her lost Arcadia with a colder eye. Hampden is seductive precisely because it is artificial. Julian Morrow's seminar is a performance of the classical world, not the thing itself. The tragedy is that his students cannot tell the difference — or, more precisely, that they have decided not to try.

The novel's great achievement is the way it makes us complicit in their reasoning. We follow the logic. We understand, in a discomfiting way, how someone might conclude that a clumsy, vulgar, blackmailing friend — someone who had become a liability, a crack in the beautiful surface of things — might be less important than the idea of beauty itself. We do not agree. But we understand. And that understanding is the novel's darkest gift.