But this is also shown via Harriet's interest in Houdini, references to Lazarus in the Baptist church after Robin dies, Harriet's reading about Robert Falcon Scott, Harriet's practicing holding her breath to imitate Houdini's underwater tricks, and at the climax of the story, Harriet's escape from Danny Ratliff by playing dead in the water tower by holding her breath. Her classmate was novelist Bret Easton Ellis, who wrote in The Rules Of Attraction about "that weird Classics group. This is superbly demonstrated in The Little Friend in the character of Gum, grandmother to the white, troubled, trailer-park family, the Ratliffs, and one of the most memorable monsters in recent literature. And he gave me a copy of his poems, in Finnish, and a present which I wasn't allowed to open until I got on the plane.

All these interviews and profiles, this concentration on the author's personality, her lifestyle, her sales figures and her deals, are threatening to suck the oxygen out of the critical debate. There are none of the aesthetic sweeteners of The Secret History here, none of its beautiful people and elegant plotting.

Nobody, it's clear, knew quite where on earth Donna Tartt would choose to go next after her brilliant debut novel of 10 years ago. No divine aid for him; he’d taught himself the hard way how to beat back panic, the horror of suffocation and drowning and dark.

Whatever it was Donna Tartt came up with next, it seemed likely to be set in a place and at a time which she would manage to make entirely convincing.

At the same time, the contradictions between hype, success and privacy were already clear: as Bret Easton Ellis said, "You can't be Salinger and be represented by ICM. What "growing up" entailed [in life as in books] was a swift and inexplicable dwindling of character. Then she says - and you get the feeling she can already see this in big type, a modern-day Dorothy Parker - "I like a glass of whiskey in the winter, I like a gin and tonic in the summer, I like a glass of champagne anytime. There might be a boyfriend at the moment - at one point she says "we", quickly changing it to "I", although that could mean her dogs. As with the best 19th-century novels, it is indulgently expansive, as cluttered and overstuffed as Harriet's rambling house.