On the eve of the September 1992 publication of Donna Tartt's debut novel, The Secret History, the 28-year-old author was earmarked for instant celebrity. Her literary pedigree was impeccable: hailed as a "genius" at age 16 by fellow Mississippian and former Harper's magazine editor Willie Morris, Tartt had begun her highbrow thriller while studying at Bennington College, a literary backdrop made famous by the novels of her schoolmate and friend, Bret Easton Ellis.

All the pieces of a headline-grabbing launch were in place. The previous year, Knopf had won Tartt's book in a fierce auction for a reported $450,000—an even more princely sum in those days. Within months, the house had sold rights in 11 countries for more than $500,000, and paperback rights for another $510,000, while agent Binky Urban optioned film rights to Alan Pakula, director of All the President's Men. Two printings of the galley and Tartt's splashy appearance at the annual ABA convention had kicked up word-of-mouth among booksellers and in the media. And the hardcover, which was packaged in an elongated trim with a distinctive celluloid jacket, had an announced first printing of 75,000 copies.

Agog at Tartt's erudition and smitten by her "Norma Desmond sunglasses and dark, bobbed hair," Vanity Fair sealed her fate by devoting seven pages to the Lolita-sized literary figure who could spout Nabokov and Eliot by heart. While Esquire, Vogue, Elle and Mirabella touted the novel as the debut of the year, critics at daily papers and newsmagazines clamored to review it upon its publication. In the New York Times, Michiko Kakutani described it as a cross between "the plot of Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment [and] the story of Euripides' Bacchae set against the backdrop of Bret Easton Ellis's Rules of Attraction and told in the elegant, ruminative voice of Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited." Time hailed it as "the novel that has everything: chills, thrills, campus scandals, literary jokes."

Two days after pub, Newsweek backhandedly acknowledged Tartt's runaway success in an article by Laura Shapiro titled "Anatomy of a Hype." Quoting an unnamed editor who claimed that "the landscape is littered with the corpses of overpraised young writers," Shapiro wondered if "such a gigantic fuss is in the best interest of a first-time author." As if to underscore the point, Richard Eder delivered a scathing assessment of the book in the Los Angeles Times a few days later, charging that Tartt was "free with attributes and stingy with character" and that the book's second half "sags badly." Other mixed reviews followed.

Though The Secret History became an international bestseller, and remained on the PW bestseller list for three months, Tartt was dogged by Shapiro's question, often posed by subsequent interviewers who insinuated that she was a "one-hit wonder." During those endless interviews, the young author took care to shield the second novel she had begun writing from the media's gaze. "It was a real lifeline," she told PW at a recent meeting over green tea and finger sandwiches in a Japanese tearoom on Manhattan's Upper East Side. "I didn't talk about it, but I knew that it was there, in a very quiet sense, when they kept asking, 'well, what are you going to do to top this?' "

Murder, with a Difference

Ten years later, Tartt's answer to that question has finally emerged, in the form of The Little Friend (Knopf, Nov.). Like The Secret History, it's set in the aftermath of a murder. Here, Harriet Cleve Dufresnes, an intensely brainy 12-year-old, commits herself to exacting retribution on the person she believes killed her brother Robin, found hanging from a tree in the family's yard when Harriet was less than a year old.

While both novels give off a whiff of evil that's reminiscent of William Golding's Lord of the Flies, the two couldn't be more different. Where The Secret History focused on an elite student clique in a homogenous New England academic community in the 1980s, The Little Friend ranges confidently across the surprisingly complex strata of a small Mississippi town in the early '70s, evoking relationships among several generations, as well as the intersecting lives of the white gentility, the black working class and impoverished backwoods rednecks (see Forecasts, p. 40).

According to several key booksellers, Tartt has outdone herself. "I think it's the next Huck Finn," said Sessalee Hensley, fiction buyer at Barnes & Noble. "It's a great American novel. I was knocked out by it." Noting that she was "not a Secret History fan," because that book's cynicism didn't appeal to her, Hensley explained that she had originally estimated her order for The Little Friend before she read the book. Once she picked it up, Hensley was "hooked from the first page. You know a dark incident shaped this family's life, and she reveals it so masterfully," she commented. "The structure is great." The book also appealed to Hensley as someone who grew up in the South: "She has a huge command of the language, and does a great job of capturing the vernacular." When Hensley finished the novel, she tripled her order.

At Boston's Harvard Bookstore, manager Carol Horne declared the book "terrific," adding, "there are some scenes in there that are among the most harrowing I've read. When I got to the last chapter, I stopped and waited until the weekend, because I knew I wasn't going to be able to put the book down until I was finished. And I was glad I did." In terms of overall quality, Horne compared the book to Leif Enger's Peace Like a River and Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections—two books, she noted, that went on to win major awards last year.

Tartt acknowledged that in her second book, she set challenges for herself that would allow her to grow as a writer. One was to widen the social canvas. Another was to assume a broader point of view. While The Secret History was told from a single perspective, deriving its suspense from a narrator who doesn't fully understand what's going on around him, The Little Friend is told from an omniscient viewpoint that drops down into the minds of various characters.

"I don't want to sound pretentious," said Tartt with a laugh that acknowledged she had been portrayed that way before, "but the point of view that I wrote this book from is the Tolstoyan view. It's like War and Peace—not in any way approaching merit, but in terms of structure. Technically, that's comparable to the symphonic voice. It's widely thought to be the most difficult form." Pausing carefully, she added, "I guess the most difficult thing would to be invent your own form. But in terms of traditional form, [the Tolstoyan viewpoint] is pretty hard." Laughing again, she added, "I mean, it seemed really difficult to me."

Another hurdle, Tartt added, was writing from a child's point of view. "I will tell you that is not easy. There are two children, a boy and a girl, and [I had] to try to distinguish them," she said. But Tartt remains as unsentimental as ever: "The trick in writing about children is to resist the temptation to make them lovable. Children perceive things quite clearly, but their emotional motivations are murky and often quite primitive, and they don't always entirely understand what they see."

Great Expectations

The wild success of Tartt's first novel brought with it the expectation that she would quickly produce another bestseller. Yet, ironically, Tartt's royalties from the sales of more than one million hardcovers and paperbacks in the U.S., as well as more than 21 foreign editions of The Secret History, granted her the freedom to resist that pressure. "Those were not the rules I wanted to play by. I can't think of anything worse than having a big success, and then trying to rush out another big success," she commented.

Though Tartt's long withdrawal from the public eye makes it tempting to speculate that she may have started another novel during that time, she dismissed the notion. "Basically, I stayed with what I was working on and kept working and re-working until I figured it out," she said. As for why it took 10 years, Tartt explained, "You know, my first novel took a decade to write, too. Writing over a long period of time, one builds up a sense of richness and verisimilitude which is impossible to fake—the sense of a world with its own flora and fauna and government, and its own laws."

Many booksellers applaud her dedication. "I would put Donna Tartt in the Jonathan Franzen camp," said Barnes & Noble's Hensley. "The ones who hold out to publish what they really want to write—those are our greatest writers." For his part, Knopf publisher Sonny Mehta refutes any lingering misconception that the house may have pressured Tartt to deliver. "I don't believe we ever said, 'Donna, where's the book?' Fiction is not necessarily timebound. The best support you can give a writer is the time they need to do the work."

"If there's a challenge we have as a publisher," said Knopf publicity director Paul Bogaards, "it's on the retail side. There's a generation of buyers and readers out there who weren't around when the first book came out." But Bogaards was quick to point to the substantial backlist sales of The Secret History as the surest antidote to bookseller skepticism about Tartt's continuing appeal. At Borders, fiction buyer Bridget Mason confirmed that the book is a "core title" that has been actively stocked at all retail locations since its original publication, and has "sold really well for a 10-year-old book."

As for The Little Friend, Cathy Langer, frontlist buyer at Denver's Tattered Cover, finds it "as universally appealing as The Secret History. It's not just a woman's book, or just a man's book. I could put it in anyone's hands and make them happy," she said. " I can't wait until it gets here and I can sell it."

Langer's excitement doesn't surprise Carl Lennertz, program director for BookSense, the marketing arm of the Association of American Booksellers. "There's a good buzz on this one," he observed, adding that the book is "tracking" for the November BookSense '76, a list of titles recommended by independent booksellers.

At Borders, Mason expects "a lot of pent-up demand," though she acknowledged, "The reaction tends to fall at one extreme or the other: either people have no idea who Donna Tartt is, or they're rabidly awaiting the new novel." According to Borders publicity director Ann Binkley, projecting the performance of The Little Friend has been "a little nerve-wracking, because so much is unknown. Second books are always difficult. But if we're erring, it's on the side of a bestseller."

If Knopf has anything to do with it, everyone will know who Donna Tartt is before the end of October. In an unusual move, the house has agreed to serialize the prologue and first chapter of the book from October 15 to 22 on the Web site dailycandy.com, which reaches "the most influential movers and shakers in the media, art, fashion and PR worlds," said Bogaards. Appearances on the Today show (October 24) and NPR will air as the long-lead glossies deliver their reviews. And major newspapers should weigh in shortly after 275,000 copies of the book hit the stores.

For Tartt's fans, the most urgent question—Will there be another 10-year wait for the next novel?—is one she'd prefer to sidestep. A novella based on the myth of Daedalus and Icarus that was commissioned by the Scottish publisher Canongate should be finished some time next year, she said. But as befits someone who has resisted second-guessing for so long, she won't commit to a specific delivery date on her next full-length novel.