8 Comments

April's writing is gorgeous, and I admire her humility. Thank you for this piece. Can't wait to revisit the novel this summer.

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After sixty or more years of life on this often-hellscape planet, I have never been more astonished by the fascination with the worst specimens of humanity, presented fictionally to titillate somehow the readers who may be attracted to the low-life. Dickens, praise him, and the greatest of the great writers in English over centuries, if they created characters of evil substance, invariably, gave them their just comeuppance. A portrayal of venomous behavior in a story that fails to condemn the character and his actions is of no benefit to humankind, because the ideal is shortshrifted. The reader of such a work is thus also condemned to the misery such evil causes without any respite. Authors who do this to readers are perverse. It is enough in life to witness or experience evil. But to willingly swallow it in fiction is, to me, a bizarre fetish, the reasons for one doing so ought to be fodder of much introspection.

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I feel bad for you.

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So you mean to say that you enjoy reading about the misery of the world? Of evil characters, imagined all, who prosper? And that a reader who has read that kind of writing for fifty years ought not to be disenchanted with it?

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I read to marvel at the world, in all of its profundity. I read to both escape and confront my perceptions of reality. Most importantly, I read because good writing is like alchemy, turning dirt into gold.

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Make sure it’s gold you’re reading and not pyrite.

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Grateful to you Richard and Madeline for reading and sharing your thoughts! I have not actually read "The Talented Mr. Ripley" myself, but I am fond of other books with main characters who are not always good; I find they help me to consider the darker parts of being human. Ripley is a bit of a special case maybe because we see so little into him. I think April's reading suggests that some of his (and her character Pirate Jenny's) destructive force comes from looking in at easy privileged lives that they cannot access: their behavior is a kind of combustable outcome of talent and resentment. I do think there is a kind of implicit comeuppance: Ripley leads a divided life without rest, everything he does is an escape from his past, he will never really be a part of where he tries to land. Maybe illustrating this as a feeling without spelling it out is part of what Highsmith is up to.

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My pleasure. It is very easy to write of the awfulness of mundane existence and, for me, impossible any longer to read when the writer hasn't offered better than human misery. The writer whose work lasts offers more: the discovery of what transcends.

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