When I read something new, I can at least be a small ray of light pointed at it. When I read comics or fantastika, I have at least my history in those genres (I judged awards! I edited stuff ! I used to be somebody, in a small way!) to lean on.
More and more, though, I'm reading Big Famous Books, by Big Famous People, some of those books older than I am - and I am, as I've implied, somewhat old myself - and I keep getting myself tangled around that axle, pointing out (counterproductively) that you folks have no reason to take anything I say seriously.
But, then again, none of us have much of a reason to take any artistic judgements by others seriously. It's all force of argument and inertia and existing prejudices and borrowed gravitas and stuff like that. So: I'm going to try to stop running through this argument each time. Let's see if I can.
Those thoughts are brought to you by the fact that Patricia Highsmith's 1955 novel The Talented Mr. Ripley came across to me as a well-written, psychologically smart...fairly standard noir novel of the era, of the subset published by larger and more reputable publishers and in which the POV criminal gets away with it. Those two things are tightly linked, though it's hard to say which is the cause and which the effect: the books from paperback houses could be well-written, could be smart, could be just as good - but the criminal would always be caught and punished, or possibly die in a thematically appropriate way.
I don't mean that as a negative: I like mid-century noir, have read in it off and on for a long time, and think it's a deep well with things I can probably keep digging up for as long as I'm still able to read. But The Talented Mr. Ripley came to me in fancy literary-novel dress, and it was an interesting experience to peer more closely and see the disreputable character lurking in those borrowed clothes.
I read Ripley, I think, because I realized I had two copies of it, in different omnibuses, on my shelves, and took that as A Sign. So I read it in the 1999 Everyman's Library of the three Ripley novels - back in those days when there were only three; two more came later - which also was a big clue that this noir novel would not go in the obvious direction towards justice and retribution.
It's a 1955 novel, set at that time. Tom Ripley is a young man not overly burdened with conscience or purpose: he's running some vague short cons in New York, caught up in a vaguely sleazy downtown crowd he's coming to hate, and wants more without having a clear vision of what he wants or any desire to work for it. He falls into an opportunity when the father of a vague acquaintance, Dickie Greenleaf, hires him to go to Europe, find Dickie, and convince him to come back home and take up a boring job at the father's quite profitable boat-manufacturing operation.
Tom sees this as a way to get to Europe with money in his pocket, and, like so much else in his life, he's happy to let other details figure themselves out later. He goes. He finds Dickie in a small Italian town, and befriends him. He becomes the third wheel in Dickie's not-quite-courtship of fellow American expatriate Marge Sherwood. She distrusts Tom, while Dickie mostly likes him, in that vague way rich people have when nothing impinges or bothers them very much.
Things escalate from there; if you've heard of the book, you probably know how. It is noir, of a type: that's a clue. And Tom both wants to be Dickie - take over his life, live the same kind of life - and, in a sublimated '50s way, wants to win Dickie, get him away from Marge. (There's a bunch of period-appropriate demurrals, mostly in dialogue to each other, of anyone being "queer," and Tom comes across as mostly asexual, but there's some level of sex in Tom's fascination with Dickie. I gather the later novels make Tom officially bisexual: from the evidence here, he's either uninterested in sex entirely or gay but entirely closeted from himself.)
I won't fill in the dots: it's a good novel, and a short one. (It's also been turned into a movie that's generally well-regarded - I've never seen that and probably won't.) If you've ever liked writers like Jim Thompson and David Goodis and Chester Himes and Charles Williams, you'll probably like this one. Highsmith is mostly working in that contemporary paperback idiom, but breaking away from it to have a more serious-novel ending.
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