On November 30, 1955, Patricia Highsmith published her fourth novel (her third under her own name—she originally published 1952’s The Price of Salt as Claire Morgan), a psychological thriller starring the one and only Tom Ripley, the character who would become Highsmith’s most famous. This, of course, was The Talented Mr. Ripley, a book that arrived to acclaim and continues to delight and influence readers and writers of all kinds.
Highsmith famously wrote the book in six months in 1954. “It felt like Ripley was writing it,” she said later, “it just came out.” Also famously, the writer identified strongly with her morally gray antihero, so that probably helped too. (Highsmith herself nursed a royal flush of abhorrent views, and was once described by her American publisher as "a mean, cruel, hard, unlovable, unloving human being.") In an 1989 issue of Granta, she recalled her earliest inklings of the character. Highsmith was visiting Positano on the Amalfi coast; she looked out her window and "noticed a solitary young man in shorts and sandals with a towel flung over his shoulder, making his way along the beach from right to left.
He was looking downward... I could just see that his hair was straight and darkish. . . There was an air of pensiveness about him, maybe unease. And why was he alone? He did not look like the athletic type who would take a cold swim alone at an early hour. Had he quarrelled with someone? What was on his mind? I never saw him again. I did not even write anything in my cahier about him. What would there have been to say? He looked like a thousand other American tourists in Europe that summer.
But Ripley was not like a thousand other American tourists—or perhaps he was. James Polchin links the power of The Talented Mr. Ripley to the discussions around the Kinsey reports, the first of which, published in 1948, revealed to an unsettled public that actually, homosexual practices were relatively common among men, and that anyone, “even the seemingly normal and congenial neighbor or co-worker,” might engage in them, in secret or otherwise.
“Tom Ripley was as much a force of Highsmith’s imagination as he was of the fears of sexual deviancy and psychopathic violence in the 1950s,” Polchin writes.
But in another way the novel is quite radical in how we thrill in Tom’s deceits and his skills at eluding detection—for either his crimes or his sexuality. Highsmith rejoiced while writing the novel, noting in her journals that she had created a book where there was an “unequivocal triumph of evil over good.” The claim was a symptom of the writer’s well-known fascination for the dark side of human nature, and her own misanthropic personality.
But it was also a reality about the novel itself. The Talented Mr. Ripley is a dark novel, and Tom is a dark, existential figure of American literature. His continued attraction and cultural life reflects as much a fascination with Cold War America, and the powerful lure of the confidence man, as with the image of the devious and violent queer criminal.
Whatever the reason, our fascination continues—though there is already a near-perfect adaptation of the novel (you know the one), Netflix is set to premiere a new series based on the character, starring Andrew Scott, in 2024. Ripley lives...