The Little Friend

The Little Friend (2002) is a Southern Gothic novel by Donna Tartt. Twelve-year-old protagonist Harriet Dufresnes, who lives in the small town of Alexandria, Mississippi, becomes obsessed with her brother Robin’s unsolved murder and her family’s mythical lost fortune and happiness. This coming-of-age novel traces Harriet’s attempts to discover and murder Robin’s killer, all while grappling with loss, revisionist history, secrets, and social tensions based on race, class, and gender.

Donna Tartt became a success when her debut novel, The Secret History, was published in 1992. The Little Friend is her second novel, and it won the WH Smith Literary Award and was shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction.

This guide refers to the paperback edition published by Vintage.

Content Warning: The Little Friend and this guide refer to murder, violence, and abuse. The Little Friend also contains racist and offensive language, some of which is quoted in this guide.

Plot Summary

Robin Dufresnes died 12 years ago when he was nine. His body was found hanging from a tree during a family Mother’s Day party. The police were unable to solve Robin’s murder and assumed it was probably a random visitor from out of town. The death was especially painful, so the storytelling family avoids the topic. Unable to process the death with loved ones, Robin’s mother, Charlotte, blames herself because she deviated from the traditional meal time. Her husband, Dix, has moved away but they’re still married. Her other children are Allison, now 16, and Harriet, now 12.

In addition to Charlotte, the girls have additional parental figures in Ida Rhew, who has been doing domestic work for Charlotte since before Robin’s death, as well as their grandmother Edie and their great-aunts Libby, Tat, and Adelaide, who live nearby. The family was once wealthier than they are now and likes to embellish the past. This creates in Harriet a desire to retreat into the past and bring her dead brother back. Short of this, she’s willing to settle for finding out who killed him and exacting revenge. Robin’s old cat dies, which devastates Allison. Harriet’s only friend, Hely, helps bury the cat.

Harriet and Hely’s Sunday School teacher, Mr. Roy Dial, also runs a car dealership and is a landlord. Mr. Dial has the kids write down goals but won’t read the one written by a working-class, disabled child named Curtis Ratliff. Harriet is disturbed to realize she has no clear goals, then redoubles her focus on Robin’s death. She researches his murder in the library newspaper archives, then questions her family about it. None of this helps much. Finally, she presses Hely’s older brother, Pemberton, as well as Ida Rhew. From this, she learns that Curtis has older brothers who are into crime, and one of them, Danny, used to play with Robin. Ida says the Ratliffs are bad news, and Harriet latches onto Danny as her prime murder suspect. In reality, some of Ida’s disdain for the Ratliffs is due to classism, although they do commit crimes. In fact, while Hely is fishing, the Ratliff brothers shoot at people by the river and don’t get in trouble.

Harriet enlists Hely’s help in trying to catch a poisonous snake, which is her murder weapon of choice. However, they fail to catch one and go swimming instead. Walking later, Harriet sees Curtis, who tells her that snakes bite. She doesn’t know he’s referring to his brother Eugene’s apartment, which is going to temporarily house a bunch of poisonous snakes that belong to a visiting preacher friend named Loyal. Eugene is out of crime now, but Farish and Danny are still deep in it. Mr. Dial is Eugene’s landlord and stops by often, so Eugene is worried about the snakes. The Ratliff brothers’ parents are dead, but their grandmother, Gum, is alive.

Harriet finds Danny’s picture in Robin’s old yearbook and practices holding her breath underwater like the magician Harry Houdini. At the pool hall, Hely reads comic books while adults play pool. He learns that Farish and Danny Ratliff are there and leaves to tell Harriet, who goes to spy on them. Later, she discovers Loyal’s truck full of snakes and learns from Pem that Danny and Eugene live in the apartment where the snakes are staying. The Ratliffs become paranoid that someone is spying on them. One evening, Eugene and Loyal are out preaching, so Harriet and Hely break into their apartment to steal a snake. They come back early, and Hely gets stuck inside. He releases poisonous snakes to create a diversion, but the others don’t notice, and he still can’t find his way out. Harriet then vandalizes their truck and alerts them to create a diversion for Hely to escape. This puts her on the Ratliffs’ radar, although they don’t know her name.

Harriet gets mad that Ida won’t stay late to tell her stories, so she lets it slip to Charlotte that there’s nothing to eat. Rather than cook something, Charlotte fires Ida, which devastates Harriet and Allison. Harriet and Hely take the snake and move it to the overpass above the highway. They wait until they see Danny Ratliff’s car and then drop the snake through the sunroof. However, it wasn’t Danny driving but his grandma Gum. She gets bit but doesn’t die. Harriet tells Edie she wants to go to church camp—she actually hates church camp, but she doesn’t want to be in town because she’s afraid of the Ratliffs and sad about Ida leaving. While Harriet is at camp, Edie and the aunts leave for a trip to South Carolina to see historic sites with their church group. However, Edie has to turn around because Adelaide forgot her instant coffee. She turns into oncoming traffic, and Libby has a stroke that kills her (but not immediately). After Libby dies, Edie goes to pick Harriet up from camp, and there’s a funeral. Nobody remembered to tell Odean, Libby’s housekeeper, that she died, even though the two were close like family.

The Ratliffs are determined to find out who hurt their grandmother and who’s been messing with them. They’re also becoming suspicious of each other, and Farish hides a large stash of methamphetamine in a water tower to keep them from Danny, who can’t swim. Danny secretly wants to take the drugs and sell them, move to another state, and start a different life. Harriet takes her father’s gun (which she doesn’t know how to use) and heads to the water tower; she’s seen Danny hanging around and knows he’s hiding something there. She climbs up and finds the drugs but doesn’t know what they are, and she dumps them in the water. Meanwhile, Danny fights with Farish, then brings him to the water tower and shoots him in his truck. He climbs up the tower intending to get the drugs. Harriet shoots at him but misses and tumbles back into the water. Danny tries to drown her, but she holds her breath long enough to trick him into thinking she’s dead. He then slips into the water and she leaves, thinking he will drown. Harriet returns home and is incredibly sick from the drugged water. She has a seizure and is taken to the same hospital as Farish. He survived the gunshot but isn’t expected to survive long. Eugene finds Harriet and questions her when no one else is around, but she doesn’t say anything. Mr. Dial appears and interrupts. Harriet gets Hely to hide her dad’s gun, which she forgot at the tower. The doctors examine her but don’t know what’s wrong because she won’t be honest, afraid of getting in trouble.

In the last chapter, Danny gets caught and sent to jail for murdering Farish. While Harriet is not caught, she and Hely drift apart because her experiences have left her unable to relate to him.