AND I THINK I'LL CALL YOU, APPETITE

Murder She Wrote: The talented Ms. Highsmith (Brendan Bernhard, JULY 4 - 10, 2003, LA Weekly)

Here are two anecdotes about the great American suspense novelist Patricia Highsmith. When she heard President John F. Kennedy launch into his “Ask not what your country can do for you . . .” speech on television, she left the room and went into the kitchen to feed the cats. And when she was drawing up her will, she wavered between bequeathing her fortune to the Yaddo Arts Colony and the Palestinian Intifada. Yaddo got it, but it’s hard to imagine any other major American novelist of the late-20th century considering the latter as a legatee. Even William Burroughs wasn’t that alienated from mainstream American life.

People are strange, as Jim Morrison once sang, but Patricia Highsmith was a lot stranger than most. Like Paul Bowles and Gore Vidal, her fellow novelists-in-exile (with whom she corresponded), she stood at a slight angle to the American universe. In Andrew Wilson’s fascinating — if a bit too long--new biography, Beautiful Shadow: A Life of Patricia Highsmith, there are photographs of the young author in 1949, standing on the deck of a ship about to sail from New York to Europe. She looks radiantly happy. The Old World was where she, and her heroes (they were almost always men), wanted to be.

Six years later, Tom Ripley, the Europhile antihero of The Talented Mr. Ripley, would make the same journey. Highsmith described his feelings about the city as he prepared to leave:

The atmosphere of the city became stranger as the days went on. It was as if something had gone out of New York--the realness or the importance of it--and the city was putting on a show just for him, a colossal show with its buses, taxis and hurrying people on the sidewalks . . . As if when his boat left the pier on Saturday, the whole city of New York would collapse with a poof like a lot of cardboard on a stage.

As a writer, Highsmith is pretty much sui generis. She wrote whydunits rather than whodunits, and her novels are closer in spirit to those of her literary heroes--Dostoyevsky, Camus, Poe--than to most books filed under “Mystery.” Graham Greene dubbed her “the poet of apprehension,” and Will Self said that reading Strangers on a Train brought him face to face with an almost physically palpable sense of evil. What has most disturbed readers--particularly of the Ripley novels--is the feeling that not only does Highsmith refuse to judge her murderous hero, but she approves of him as well--goading him on, in book after book, to kill and get away with it so he can live the good life in the French countryside.(The name of Ripley’s country home, Belle Ombre--Beautiful Shadow--is where Wilson gets his title.) This amorality is probably why she did better in Europe than in the States.

The thing about Ms Highsmith, and the reason she sadly belongs in the front rank of modern authors, is that (as this reviewer's comments about Europe capture) Tom Ripley represents the spirit of the age. Posted by Orrin Judd at July 12, 2003 3:45 PM