The talented but cruel Ms Highsmith
UNDER A DARK ANGEL’S EYE Patricia Highsmith (Virago)
FEW writers were so fascinated by the psychopath hiding in plain sight as Patricia Highsmith. From the ultimate conman, Tom Ripley, in her most famous novels to the sadistic Bruno from Strangers On A Train, she was utterly enthralled by men – sometimes women but mainly men – who effortlessly concealed their amorality beneath the conventions of daily life.
She was a prolific short-story writer too and this centenary collection, containing 60 selected pieces and arranged chronologically, is a depths-of-winter treat, a rogues’ gallery of grotesques who glint all the sharper for being so apparently ordinary.
Highsmith is so disinterested in the interior lives of her characters that her coolly unemotional writing comes almost as a shock. Instead, she takes her own amoral pleasure in imagining what extremes the average person is capable of. Here are sons who turn on their mothers for cooking a terrapin for supper, and doctors who murder old friends because they were in love with their wives. Here are two old ladies eking out a malicious retirement by plotting ever more ghastly acts of torments against each other.
Her writing is plain, which belies the often weird, theatrical horror of her plots: the financier suffocated by his pet snails; the murder victims arranged as a wax tableau. And when there is a motive, it’s invariably born from a frustrated, festering desire to be noticed, something Highsmith (pictured above) delights in turning against her characters.
Her superficially drawn characters can risk feeling interchangeable. Yet taken together her stories map out a disconcerting landscape of suburban boredom: of unhappily married couples, of men still living with their mothers, of people driven deliciously mad by the mundanity of their lives.