Diary: April Bernard revisits Ripley

I don’t know another novel that can match its pleasing, tortuous, low hum of anxiety. Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley, first published in 1955, is a story of a petty thief and con artist whose entire journey is a series of escapes—from his past, whatever it may be; and, increasingly, from the dangers he brings upon himself, through greed, mischief, and impulsive violence. Its great innovation—and the novel is, even more than a tale of suspense, a character study—lies in what I would call Highsmith’s anti-psychological approach. Although we accompany Tom Ripley through every sentence of the novel, we remain perplexed, even as he is; unable to predict, and certainly unable to diagnose, his nature.

Tom Ripley needs to free himself from his circumstances—to that extent, his is a familiar American story of class, and of disguise. We first meet this young man on the scruffy edges of New York City, making money through the mail with tax and bill-collecting scams, frightening targets into sending him money. Almost by accident, in an absurd plot-point that could have been borrowed from the pages of a pulp thriller, Ripley is commissioned to travel to Italy to persuade a wealthy shipbuilder’s son to return home to the family business. The son, Dickie Greenleaf, paints canvases badly, listens to jazz, drinks, and hangs out with his girlfriend on his sailboat—living an ideal life of leisure on the southern Italian coast. By studying the ways of his high-WASP targets, Ripley eventually learns how to pass as one of them, only with better taste. Perhaps sexless, perhaps homosexual, he also mostly passes as heterosexual. Highsmith follows him closely, claustrophobically, making it hard for us to breathe; narrator and reader crowd into his mind like passengers squashed into a careening car.
He stood with the letter in his hand, looking blankly around the room. He caught sight of himself in the mirror, the corners of his mouth turned down, his eyes anxious and scared. He looked as if he were trying to convey the emotions of fear and shock by his posture and expression, and because the way he looked was involuntary and real, he became suddenly twice as frightened. He folded the letter and pocketed it, then took it out of his pocket and tore it to bits.

The complexities of what goes right, and wrong, in Tom Ripley’s execution of his commission—the friendships, betrayals, suspicions, murders, and impersonations that unfold—do rivet the reader’s attention, to be sure. One of the most curious things about this clever young man is that his worst crimes are not premeditated but are, rather, matters of impulse; his cunning then must come to his rescue as he reckons, at top speed, how to cover them up. It is our own helpless implication in Ripley’s crimes, our sense that our own escape (from what?) depends on his, that makes the novel continue to haunt so many readers’ dreams.

Steven Zaillian says he has long been one such haunted reader, and the eight-part black-and white TV series he has created, with Andrew Scott as Ripley, re-embodies the novel with such faithfulness that watching it put me in a perpetual state of delirious déjà vu. (Other versions, including the 1999 film directed by Anthony Minghella, have their virtues; but all of them are miles away from Highsmith in tone.) Zaillian tidies up a few details that Highsmith left messy, and contributes one very strong, but entirely apt, additional thematic thread, by having Ripley become obsessed with the paintings, and criminal life, of Caravaggio. Robert Elswit’s cinematography creates deep three-dimensional spaces of shadow, then veers into alarming flatness in bright light; and the important visual contemplations of water—the surface of the sea, a Venetian canal—penetrate and linger like dark perfumes. Andrew Scott’s face, like the sea, deepens and flattens, opens and closes, in different lights—as we read his puzzlement at the world and himself, his heartbreaking reaching for something like love, his animal recoil from the danger others pose. Scott’s is an endlessly astonishing performance.

The series’s pace throughout also exactly matches Highsmith’s; especially in the scenes of violence and near-violence, the precision with which action unfolds is so detailed that it feels almost like slow motion. Oddly, the most terrible, culminating, moment in the story is a murder that Ripley does not, after all, decide to commit. His unwitting almost-victim, Dickie Greenleaf’s girlfriend Marge, is played by Dakota Fanning. Her job, also executed flawlessly, is to embody an obnoxious, self-serious, untalented rich girl—and as, along with Ripley, we have come to fear her suspicions, and loathe her person, our horror at her peril surely is at least in part because we so thoroughly wish her dead.

So Highsmith, and Zaillian, make monsters of us all.

My own reading of The Talented Mr. Ripley, and my attachment to it, came about peculiarly. In the late 1980s, I had written a novel—my first—about a young woman con artist who escapes from the boondocks to live in New York City. Having encountered a recording of The Threepenny Opera, she renames herself Jenny and imagines that she is a kind of pirate, boarding the merchant ships of the rich and powerful. She also adopts a (very uneven, ridiculous) German accent. One editor wrote to my agent that the book reminded him of Highsmith’s novel—which I had not yet read. Not until long after Pirate Jenny was published did I dare to sit down and actually read The Talented Mr. Ripley; as I had guessed, the experience was, to say the least, chastening. If I had read it earlier, I would have crumpled in despair.

Over time, I cheered up and decided to take heart from my own connection, however feeble, with the great artistry of Ripley. I read all of Highsmith’s stories and novels, including Strangers on a Train and the five or so additional ones about Ripley, and admired most of them. But The Talented Mr. Ripley is her best. His character must have clawed its way up from her deepest interiority and insisted on taking over the page. In the later books, when Ripley has settled into an haute-bourgeois life in a Paris suburb with a wealthy French wife (while continuing his life of crime in art fraud and theft), one can almost see Highsmith trying to account for him, even explain him—but those efforts elude her. As tempting as it always is to continue a successful series, I actually hope that Zaillian and Scott decide not to. Let Ripley remain, as he is here, terrible and lovable and inscrutably ours.

April Bernard is the author of two novels and six books of poetry, most recently The World Behind the World. She has written for Book Post on Colette, Elizabeth Hardwick, Hilary Mantel,Wallace Stevens, Janet Malcolm, and Angela Carter, among others.

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