Richard Papen

Right.

The narrator, Richard Papen, explicitly says he helped murder him.

So the suspense is completely rewired from a traditional thriller.

You aren't turning the pages to find out who did it.

They convince themselves that traditional morality is beneath them.

You know, that they operate on a higher, purely aesthetic plane.

And Richard Papen is the perfect narrator to walk the reader into this trap because he is the ultimate outsider looking in.

He wants it so badly.

But all of them were just...

they were caricatures almost yeah i guess and like fair enough like alex as a narrator is supposed to be unreliable like he's richard he is richard and it becomes but it becomes more and more clear how unreliable it is when like he at some point refers to himself as alex but he's talking in first person it'd be like alex did this and it's like oh actually who are you then yeah um But yeah, he is very much a Richard and I think he very much has a Richard Papen view on women.

Yeah, yeah.

However, it's always interesting to see it tempered through a male author gaze.

Yes.

Whereas obviously Richard Papen was written through Donna Tartt's eyeballs.

This is through Will McLean's eyeballs and it's always going to feel different.

Yeah.