In Part Two of my assessment of the Patricia Highsmith Ripley canon, I review the third and fourth novels in the series. Tom in "Ripley's Game" demonstrates a homicidal streak that could well put him in the ranks of professional hit men.
"Ripley's Game"
"Ripley's Game" is the third in Patricia Highsmith's five novel Ripley series. Readers may be reminded of her book "Strangers on a Train" because in that book and movie a stranger gets talked into committing a murder. At the beginning of the book we see Reeves, the shady fence, and Jonathan Trevanny much more than we see Tom Ripley. Ripley has set up Trevanny for Reeves.
Jonathan, a picture framer, is a major character almost eclipsing Ripley. Nearing death from cancer, he agrees to murder in order to provide his wife and son with a future.
Ripley believes in the power of positive thinking, unfortunately with a crooked bent. He always feels justified. It's a very exciting twist to the story when Ripley, pro-active and self-confident, surprisingly shows up on a train to practice his killing skills and to rescue Trevanny from failure.
Highsmith continually demonstrates her ability to create unnerving suspense and shock readers. Reading a lot of Highsmith, you get the impression that Ripley's amorality and dodginess are part of her own cosmic view of life; she's cynical about traditional morality. Ripley operates outside of normal codes of morality, beyond the limits and the norms of "civilized" society.
Ripley is like today's TV anti-hero Dexter who also flaunts the law, kills, and gets away with it. Highsmith liked, probably admired Ripley as a character and sometimes used the name Tom as her own signature. Ripley, always skating on thin ice, thinks up ridiculous half-baked and half-mad schemes, felonious games.
Highsmith has an eye for homey details which enrich her narrative skill, giving the story a sense of authenticity, ordinariness. Heavy on exposition, she usually tells rather than shows, ignoring the dictum of writing teachers, but she does it so well, it pays off.
Why do people turn to Tom for solutions to their problems when he can't solve his own insoluble messes? Heloise is the ideal wife for Tom, uncritical, amoral, self-absorbed. She glosses over what she is told even though she knows he's dodgy.
The last section of the book really doesn't make much sense, but it's fun. Nothing is ever easy in a Ripley novel. Ripley's only code of morality is survival. To others he is a tainted person, a leper.
Up until this book Ripley has committed three murders and engineered a suicide. He kills five Mafiosa in this book, and goes free to show up in the fourth novel.
"The Boy Who Followed Ripley"
In "The Boy Who Followed Ripley," the fourth in Patricia Highsmith's five-novel series about Tom Ripley, her engaging hero continues life as a homicidal psychopath still walking free, contented, and dangerous. Frank Pierson, a sixteen-year-old boy from a wealthy family, has run away from the States, read about Tom (his shaky reputation is well-known), and seeks him out at Tom's villa in France. Frank's father died either by suicide, an accident, or by his son's hand. The two are drawn together by a common bond, rather dubious consciences. Later, Susie, an old Pierson retainer, intimates that Frank and Tom are cut from the same cloth of evil and malice.
Tom later admits to Frank that he's killed men and had no qualms or despair over it. To him it's a fact of his life. He kills when he feels it's necessary.
If I were Heloise, Ripley's wife, I'd be suspicious of the close relationship between the two males, but Heloise has always been self-absorbed, an enabler for Tom and uncritical of her husband's shady character. She even asks her husband if the boy is gay. She is so into herself that she doesn't seem to care what her husband is up to.
Tom gets along well with Heloise. He's not that interested in heterosexual relations, and she is not sexually demanding. She's like his beard except he never seems to be involved in sex with males.
Tom becomes Frank's idol, mentor and his doppelganger; he's the young Tom. They become too chummy. Young Frank stays at the Ripley house, travels all over with him. Readers know that Ripley has homosexual tendencies, and they may wonder about this intimate connection. There is always a gay undertone in Ripley's life, and more of it is seen in this volume than in the second and third books. In Berlin the two visit a gay bar like lovers. Tom even gets in drag, supposedly as a disguise to rescue a kidnapped Frank, but he seems to love it.
Tom in the kidnapping episode does foolish things with the ransom money, and he can put one more notch on his killing belt. (probably nine so far in the series)
Tom has loyalties to his friends but no moral compass toward humankind in general. Tom is queasy about killing lobsters but not human beings. Tom had never felt guilt about his homicides. He always takes more risks than he should, flirts with danger and discovery.
Tom is always doing a lot of traveling, The trip to Hamburg could have easily been dropped from the book.
Tom goes back to the States with Frank to accompany him home, strange behavior for a married man of his age. Tom trips a noisy brat on the plane which brings out the meanness in his make-up. Tom wondered about Frank, "The boy adored him. Tom knew that. But love was strange too."
This is not the best book of the series; the plot is diffuse and loose; still it's a very good, exciting book that increases our knowledge of Tom by giving us a mirror image to bring out features of his character.
Never boring her readers, Highsmith always plunges right into the heart of her stories. She can create a feeling in the reader of deep foreboding; something awful about to happen. She doesn't pull any punches. The reader lives on the edge, in a state of unease and apprehension, feeling afraid of what she's going to have her characters do next.
This book ends in tragedy, but in the fifth volume it doesn't seem to have had any deep impact on Tom.
