The darkly talented Patricia Highsmith

The Complete Ripley Novels

The Talented Mr. Ripley, Ripley Under Ground, Ripley's Game, The Boy Who Followed Ripley, Ripley Under Water

Patricia Highsmith

W.W. Norton: 5 volumes boxed, $100

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In March 1954, in a rented cottage in Lenox, Mass., Patricia Highsmith, who had gained considerable acclaim with her first book, "Strangers on a Train," and much attention for her "novel of a love society forbids," "The Price of Salt," began a new novel.

"I am becoming a little odd, personally," she wrote in her notebooks about this time. And not long before: "My personal maladies and malaises are only those of my own generation and of my time, heightened."

It's pure conjecture, of course, what may have been going on in her mind as she wrote the first pages of "The Talented Mr. Ripley." But one wonders whether she may have conceived the novel, in part, as a dispatch from the front -- not simply a counterbalance to that image of 1950s America being presented in Life magazine and on television, but as a strike at something more fundamental, an indictment of America's very identity.

Highsmith had always felt estranged from the society around her and grew to feel ever more so. In 1963, she would relocate to Europe and spend the remainder of her life there. (She died in Switzerland in 1995.)

Our national literature and image, with our lives in hot pursuit, enthrone individualism. We're a strange people, eager at one and the same time to be left alone and to triumph over the world about us, Thoreau and Clint Eastwood riding double, notions of manifest destiny, freedom and all those other big words that make us so unhappy coursing and clotting in our veins. This is the land where Everyman, by force of character, can become The Man.

Tom Ripley's is the Horatio Alger story told from the underside, individualism spun out to its thinnest, keenest edge, the saga of a man who achieves all the good things of life -- security, status, wealth -- not through hard work and earnest middle-American values, but through murder and deceit.

The genius of the five novels Highsmith eventually wrote about this character lies in the manner in which she lodges us so firmly in Ripley's head that his perception of the world begins to seem almost right to us. We become so immured in his world that, like him, we are unable to see beyond it. We come very close to admiring him; we root for his escape from whatever pursuit or situation dogs him. In her book "Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction," Highsmith remarked how completely she herself had inhabited Ripley's world: "I often had the feeling Ripley was writing it and I was merely typing." The very flatness of her prose reflects Ripley's lack of center and substance, the image of a man whose self resides only in externals.