The Talented Mr. Ripley

Most of it plays out in Italy: Mongibello, San Remo, Rome, Naples, Palermo, Venice and then Greece at the very end. What I liked is the constant low-level fear that Ripley gets caught. It never lets up. And in the end he gets away with all of it.

The thing that drives the whole book, for me, is that Ripley is gay and won’t admit it to himself. Highsmith never spells it out and Tom recoils whenever anyone gets near it, but it’s there in everything he does. Marge tells Dickie she thinks Tom is queer and that’s when Dickie starts pulling away. Then Dickie catches Tom in his bedroom wearing his clothes, doing him in front of the mirror, and that’s the end of it.

That’s what makes Ripley so nervous the whole time. He isn’t only scared of the police. He’s scared of being seen at all, and the police are just the version of that fear he’s allowed to have. Nothing lets up because the thing underneath it never gets resolved. He kills Dickie in a boat off San Remo, and it isn’t really about being rejected as a lover more like it’s that Tom wants to be him, and being found out means losing the whole borrowed life at once.

Which is why the best part of the book is the impersonation. Ripley as Ripley is awkward, cringing, always saying the wrong thing. Ripley as Greenleaf blooms. Better clothes, better hotels, better posture. He is finally somebody, and he’s only somebody as long as he isn’t himself.

The charade cracks, of course. Freddie Miles turns up in Rome, doesn’t buy it, gets an ashtray. Then it’s months of switching back and forth between the two identities with the police closing in.

And he gets away. Not just escapes he wins it all. He forges a will handing himself Dickie’s trust and income, and the Greenleafs sign off on it. He sails into Piraeus rich and cleared and suspected by nobody.

Except the last page is him imagining police waiting on the dock. He has everything and he’s still braced for the hand on the shoulder. Which is the question the book leaves open: he got away from Italy, from the Greenleafs, from the law. Will he ever get away from himself?