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The Year of Women--in which I'm devoting 2021 to reading female authors only--continues with my introduction to Patricia Highsmith. Deep Water was published in 1957, the midpoint in one of my favorite eras: the 1950s. I'm fascinated by those perfect suburban homes with perfect appliances enjoyed by perfect families in perfect clothes where we'd realize there was something very wrong beneath the surface. This is canvas for a master artist like Highsmith, who surprised me with the level of affection she has for her characters, even ones who harbor morbid self-intentions and when no one's looking, act on them.



Victor and Melinda Van Allen are a thirtysomething couple well-regarded by the community of Little Wesley in Massachusetts. Their extroverted daughter Trixie attends a semiprivate grade school. Vic runs a small local press which has published twenty-six books with only two typographical errors, a distinction that he is proud of. A voracious reader, Vic is quite resourceful, while Melinda has a passionate vitality. Yet Vic sleeps in a room in the garage, where he keeps an aquaria of snails. Anyone in Little Wesley unaware of this arrangement can see Melinda flaunt her love affairs, which Vic tolerates to spare a messy divorce.

Entertaining his wife's new prospect, a traveling salesman, in their home into the wee hours, Vic decides to have some sport with him by confiding that when he dislikes someone, he kills them, someone like Malcolm McRae, a salesman that had been fond of Melinda before he was found beaten to death in his New York apartment. Word spreads around Little Wesley that Vic is a murderer, but the rumor does far less damage to his reputation than it does Melinda's social life, for a few weeks. When McRae's murderer is captured and the town stops whispering about Vic being the culprit, Melinda is able to keep the attention of a new pet, a piano player named Charley De Lisle.

Vic knew what was happening, and he tried to make Melinda admit it and stop it before it got all over town. He simply told her, in a quiet way, that he thought she was seeing too much of Charley De Lisle.

"You're imagining things," she said. "The first person I've been able to talk to in weeks without being treated like a pariah, and you hate it. You don't want me to gt any fun out of life, that's all!"

She could say things like that to him if she really meant them. She could actually stymie him and make him wonder if she really believed what she said. In an effort to be fair with her, he tried to see it the way she told it, tried to imagine that it was impossible that she could be attracted to a greasy, sick-looking nightclub entertainer. But he couldn't see it that way. She had made the same denials in regard to Jo-Jo, and Jo-Jo had been equally repellent from Vic's point of view, and yet "that" had happened. Jo-Jo had been so amusing, a laugh a minute. He'd tried to be nice to Trixie. Now Charley De Lisle was such a wonderful piano player. He was showing her how to improve her playing. He came over a couple of afternoons a week now, after three when Vic had left the house, and he gave Melinda a lesson until five when he had to go to work at the Lord Chesterfield. Trixie was generally home in the afternoons, so what was the harm in his coming over? But sometimes Melinda wasn't home for lunch, and sometimes they didn't play the piano in the afternoon, because an ashtray that Vic had seen on the keyboard at two o'clock would be there when he got home at seven. Sometimes they were up at Charley De Lisle's house, where there wasn't a piano.

Patricia Highsmith writes in a language that lit my mind up like a neon sign. Deep Water, like most of her fiction, is written in third person singular (past) tense. She doesn't write as if she is Vic but as if she were Vic's best friend, or psychiatrist perhaps, tuned in to his thoughts and reasoning logic, presenting a solid case on his behalf that he's smarter than everyone in Little Wesley or anyone visiting there to involve themselves in his affairs. Highsmith made me an accessory to Vic's plotting. I wanted to see him get away with it, due in part to how reasonable he seems, what a good father and employer he is and how well liked by the community. Yet under the surface ...

Why had she said anything at all if she hadn't done anything with De Lisle or didn't intend to? When a woman as attractive as Melinda handed it to them on a platter, why should a man like De Lisle resist? The morals to resist didn't come very often any more. That was for people like Henri III of France, after his wife the Princesse de Conde died. There was devotion, Henri sitting in the library the rest of his life, with his memories of the Princesse, creating designs of skulls and crossbones for Nicolas Eve to put on book covers and title pages for him. Henri would probably be called psychotic by modern psychiatrists.

Deep Water could take place now with only a few modifications. The novel felt to me as if it was written today. Highsmith is expertly tuned in to psychology, to the dynamics of a relationship, be it a friendship or a marriage. The relationship between Vic and Trixie felt remarkably tender to me. Rather than portray Vic as a psycho who must be stopped at all costs, Highsmith had me flipping the pages, hoping he'd get away with his crimes. That is quite a feat. In 2022, a film version directed by Adrian Lyne (Flashdance, Fatal Attaction, Unfaithful) will be released starring Ben Affleck and Ana de Armas as Vic and Melinda Van Allen.

Patricia Highsmith was born in 1921 in Fort Worth, Texas. She took the name of her stepfather and at age six moved to New York City with him and her mother, who despised Highsmith even before it became evident that her daughter was homosexual. Highsmith attended Barnard College and wrote for the student literary magazine. With a reference from Truman Capote she was admitted to the Yaddo arts colony in 1948. Highsmith's debut novel Strangers on a Train was adapted into a hit movie directed by Alfred Hitchcock in 1950. She went on to publish twenty-two novels and numerous short stories. Highsmith died in 1995 in Locarno, Switzerland.



Previous reviews in the Year of Women:

-- Come Closer, Sara Gran
-- Veronica, Mary Gaitskill
-- Clothes, Clothes, Clothes, Music, Music, Music, Boys, Boys, Boys, Viv Albertine
-- Pizza Girl, Jean Kyoung Frazier
-- My Year of Rest and Relaxation, Ottessa Moshfegh
-- Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe, Fannie Flagg
-- The Memoirs of Cleopatra, Margaret George
-- Miss Pinkerton, Mary Roberts Rinehart
-- Beast in View, Margaret Millar
-- Lying In Wait, Liz Nugent
-- And Then There Were None, Agatha Christie
-- Desperate Characters, Paula Fox
-- You, Caroline Kepnes