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FICTION
The Talented Mr. Ripley; Ripley Under Ground; Ripley's Game
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| Published: | January 1999 |
| Pages: | 880 |
| Publisher: | Everyman's Library |
| Links:
Author site Wired for Books audio interview BBC interview Author Swiss Literary Archives |
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It took Matt Damon's film portrayal for America to finally warm to the cold-blooded killer Tom Ripley. Tom's creator, Patricia Highsmith, on the other hand, died before American readers could do the same for her. The highbrow Ripley crime novels, which were bestsellers in Europe from the '50s onward, experienced only middling success in the US, and in the 1960s Highsmith left the States for the continent and never looked back. Her expatriation was about more than just American indifference to her books, however: Europe was a more hospitable place for a curmudgeonly, bibulous, misogynistic lesbian to live and work. Clearly, Highsmith was as complicated as Mr. Ripley.
Five novels comprise the so-called "Ripliad," but only the first three have stood the test of time. The trilogy began in 1955 with The Talented Mr. Ripley, wherein Tom, an orphan of humble origins, is paid by a shipbuilding magnate to fetch his son, Dickie, from a life of leisure on the Italian coast. Tom envies Dickie's life and wants his affection — the novel's homoeroticism, which the eponymous movie only hints at, is palpable — and when it's ultimately unrequited, Tom kills Dickie and impersonates him, out of both criminal necessity and pathological creepiness. Ripley Under Ground catches up with our antihero five years later: Ripley's happily, sexlessly married and living on a French estate, when he turns again to murder and subterfuge after an art-world scam he helped devise threatens to unravel. Ripley's Game, published in 1974 and itself popular film fodder, gets started when Ripley receives an offer to serve as a hit man, and — surprisingly — demurs.
The designation "crime writer" sells short Highsmith's considerable gifts of characterization — Tom fascinates because he's simultaneously likable and repulsive — and fails to account for her inattention to genre conventions: with Ripley as the protagonist, we always know whodunit; the mystery lies in how he'll get away with it.
Highsmith's literary story has a happy ending, although she didn't live to see it. Anthony Minghella's film of the first novel was released in 1999. That same year, Knopf — the publisher that rejected her final book a year before her death in 1995 — released this Everyman's Library omnibus edition of the three Ripley novels that immortalized literature's most amiable psychopath, thereby canonizing Highsmith in one fell swoop.
-Chris Parris-Lamb