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I loved the Matt Damon/Jude Law film based on this book, have seen it 2-3 times, but until now I had never read the book, and I found it amazing. Deliciously wicked first person account of a psychopath, Tom Ripley, whom we know from the first is an arrogant fraud, fleeing creditors and the cops until he is invited by a rich lawyer, a Mr. Greenleaf, to travel to Italy to talk his trust-funded son Richard--Dickie--into returning to America.

“Mr Greenleaf was such a decent fellow himself, he took it for granted that everybody else in the world was decent, too. Tom had almost forgotten such people existed.�

I know Highsmith, like her protagonist, was a (necessarily, given the fifties), closeted gay person who hated most people, including herself. It occurred to me in reading this book, and building on what I just read in Highsmith’s Carol, that someone who was gay in the fifties had to “pass� as straight, had to perform a double life, and Tom Ripley is doing just that as a fraud, lying his way through life. In this story he lies and cheats everyone he meets and despises, except Dickie Greenberg, whom he adores and wants to be like. He studies Dickie and wants to be him, dress like him, talk like him, all of it. But he can’t be him, as much as he tries. But he does try.

Ripley--believe it or not, get it? And you may claim you wouldn’t, but most people do eventually believe him--loves Europe, wants it all:

“He loved possessions, not masses of them, but a select few that he did not part with. They gave a man self-respect. Not ostentation but quality, and the love that cherished the quality. Possessions reminded him that he existed, and made him enjoy his existence. It was as simple as that. And wasn't that worth something? He existed. Not many people in the world knew how to, even if they had the money. It really didn't take money, masses of money, it took a certain security.�

As with many noir anti-heroes (and some of us?), Tom is a working-class guy who wants the trappings of wealth. He must have money to travel and buy the best meals, stay at the best hotels, and see all of the beauties and majestic sights and museums of Europe. But he has no obvious talents to do anything beyond his powers to lie and deceive and defraud. What’s his trick?

�. . . you wanted to be cheerful, or melancholic, or wistful, or thoughtful, or courteous, you simply had to act those things with every gesture.�

But Ripley has to do more than that just act; he has to believe what he says:

“His stories were good because he imagined them intensely, so intensely that he came to believe them.�

I said when I read The Price of Salt/Carol, that that was her best book, but this is even better, really, just wickedly seductive, probably her very best. It reminded me of Nabokov’s wicked Humbert Humbert, who is evil but lures us in, nevertheless. He continues to defraud us even as we realize he is defrauding us. As Alison Bechdel said about Highsmith's protagonists, she even gets us to sort of root for the villain. Now that is a wicked talent in a writer. I was reminded, too, of Henry James in his writing of Americans abroad, only with a twist. Highly recommended, then watch or re-watch the film.