The Secret History: a rant (spoilers)

Welp. A fic I liked a lot praised Donna Tartt's The Secret History, and I remembered that I had been vaguely planning on reading it for *gulp* decades. Reader, I bought it.

The Secret History is set at a small second-rate liberal-arts college in Vermont, some time in the 1970s. Reader, I attended a small second-rate liberal-arts college in Vermont, late in the 1970s. This is my specialist subject. As I read, not only did I dislike the characters (more later), I disliked the milieu. I'm going to go a bit Mark Twain here.

• Small liberal-arts colleges in the 1970s do not teach domestic arts. One of the characters' girlfriend is taking classes in the Early Childhood Center. If a liberal-arts college in the 70s taught anything as obviously job-oriented as that, all the professors would have been laughed out of the next MLA or equivalent. My own college was vaguely ashamed of teaching education; you couldn't major in it, and IIRC the minor didn't include all the courses necessary to earn a teaching certificate.


• The protagonist is forced to stay at school during the winter break, which for some reason lasts through all of December and January. He can't stay in the dorms, and he can't afford to pay for housing. The only thing he can find is sleeping quarters with a hippie who builds furniture. When he arrives, it turns out that the barn he's supposed to sleep in not only has no heating, but has a hole in the ceiling through which snow falls. He sleeps in blankets, "two or three sweaters, long underwear, wool trousers and overcoat". In those pre-global-warming days, Vermont winters routinely (and this is mentioned in the text) hit 20-below-zero Fahrenheit, -29 Celsius.
  
  "A good many people asked me later if I had realized what a dangerous thing this was, attempting to live in an unheated building in upstate Vermont during the coldest months of the year, and to be frank, I hadn't. ... the stories I'd heard, of drunks, of old people, of careless skiers freezing to death, but for some reason none of this seemed to apply to me."
  
  Here is the problem. Anybody who has lived through -20 weather knows that just walking through the air freezes your face. It freezes the breath in your nostrils. If, late for class, you run across campus with wet braided hair, it freezes your hair. No matter how vague your notions about cold weather are, once you've walked through negative twenty, you are well aware that this stuff will kill you if you let it. Pride is all very well, but sleeping night after night in -20 weather in a room that is open to the goddamned sky will kill you, and death will not come as a surprise.


• The hero's wealthy friends apparently do not notice that he's poor, except for the one nasty bully. If there's one thing that people who have grown up wealthy notice, it's the signifiers of being wealthy. I'm only halfway through the book, so maybe it will turn out they've known all along but are pretending not to know.


• The hero's friends commit a Dionysaic murder, as one does. One of them punches a man so hard that his brains splash all over the murderer's clothes.

And here is where we get into my really, really specialist subject, and I get very cross indeed. Our heroes (?) want to poison somebody. They feed mushrooms to two dogs, one of which dies, the other doesn't. They want to calculate from this the lethal and sub-lethal doses of Amanita muscaris.

The hero says that he could certainly have done this with a Physician's Desk Reference, but unfortunately it doesn't cover mushrooms. No. But you know what does, that your college library will certainly have? A book or two on toxicology. It's not hard. Look up "poisons", rejoicing in the knowledge that it's the 1970s and that card catalogs do not track search history. Read your finds in the stacks, rejoicing that the librarians will pay you no notice at all.

The heroes then spend a dreadful night's effort because to work out the two doses would require "a good working knowledge of calculus and chemistry proper. There's no way to figure it otherwise." They use calculus and fail, because only somebody with "three or four years of college calculus" could do it.

Not everybody is mathy, but when you're faced with "Dog A died of X amount of poison, Dog B didn't", calculus could not be more beside the point than Boolean logic. If you knew the dogs' weights, it would be a fricking ratio. The friend blathers on about the variation in concentration of poison from one mushroom to the next, and this concept right there tells you why mathematics in general, and calculus in particular, will get you nowhere.

The hero goes on, "There's no way to figure it otherwise. I mean, chemical concentrations aren't even measured in terms of grams and milligrams but in something called moles."

1. The friend, like the hero, is attending a small mediocre liberal-arts college. That means that he has in fact studied high-school chemistry and knows perfectly well how to convert grams to moles and back.


2. The hero thought vaguely of being a doctor, and spent a lot of time volunteering and taking side classes before college. He knows what the PDR is. He therefore knows that medications are in fact prescribed in practical units, not moles, and he probably knows that medications are dosed by body weight.

And that's where I stopped for the night. I hope that all the characters are successful in their murder, that they are then sent to jail for the rest of their natural days, and that everybody else in this book is hit by falling casques.