Sure thing! The book is very much a satire, and the narrator goes through great lengths to try and romanticize wealth, status, and a view of academic life that, for me, felt very superficial—and as a satire, that’s totally valid, but I always had some difficulty in figuring out where the line was between Tartt’s brand of irony and her actual authorial beliefs. I always got the sense that she did, to some extent, actually hold a lot of the biases that she was calling out in the novel’s characters, and I felt this most strongly in the way she described the college and the lives of the classics students. The book is primarily centered around characters who are rich, bored, and motivated only by being (or seeming) smarter than their peers, and from my perspective, this element of their characters is portrayed as somewhat aspirational, as Tartt never fully commits to satirizing these traits. Incidentally, I described this book to my friend as American Psycho for English majors, in the sense that I worry that some (Tartt included) might romanticize the elements of the book that I feel are most deserving of being treated as satire.

All that being said, I didn’t hate the book. The plot was engaging, the prose was solid, and Tartt did a very good job of pulling me into the world. There was just an underlying elitism—even as she attempted to criticize elitism—to it all, and that hindered my enjoyment.