The Talented Mr Ripley

The subtractive test bites less here than in most crime novels, because the spine is one consciousness under pressure and almost every scene either feeds Tom Ripley’s want or tests his cover. The New York chapters cannot go: the mail fraud, the borrowed apartments and Aunt Dottie’s mean cheques establish a man with no self of his own before he is offered someone else’s. Mongibello is required for the same reason; the scene in which Dickie finds Tom in his clothes, mimicking him before the mirror, is the hinge of the book and needs the slow weeks before it. The axis gives in the middle third. From Rome to Venice one movement, a visitor, a lie, a narrow escape, relief, repeats more often than the argument needs, and the Palermo stretch and some of the Venice social business could be cut with a loss of duration, not of sense. The duration is partly the point, the strain of being two men, but not all of it is earned.

Score: 7.9 / 10

What the book brings into the open can be stated, and it holds. A self can be assembled entirely from possessions, manners and another man’s signature, and a world of money and leisure will accept the assembly as a person, because it reads people by their things. Tom wants Dickie’s life before he wants his death; the murder follows from the impersonation, not the other way round. The second disclosure is about the reader, who finds himself wanting the murderer to escape, and the book lets that discovery stand without comment. A third lies under the surface, never named: shame and desire in Tom’s feeling for Dickie, and Dickie’s contempt when he suspects it, a closeted want curdling into appropriation. The figure does not rest on it. What holds the axis below the gate is depth: Tom’s interior is exact as appetite, fear and calculation, but the book knows little of how such a man comes to be, and it does not hold a society in view as the great social novels do.

Score: 8.3 / 10

The lowest of the twelve. Highsmith’s register is the low, steady hum of anxiety, and the book’s power lies in duration, not in height. There are moments of cold elevation: the killing in the boat off San Remo, with the oar, the stone tied to the body, the boat sunk and the bloodstain Tom cannot stop thinking of; the long night in Rome with Freddie Miles’s body, walked down the stairs as a drunk; the arrival in Venice, Tom alone in a palazzo rented on a dead man’s money, at something like peace. The pleasure he takes in Europe, its light, its paintings, the boats on the Grand Canal, is given with real feeling, and it is the beauty of a thing stolen. What holds the axis lowest is design: the prose is kept level and rarely rises with its occasions, and the dread is a pressure, not a transport. Height is moderate, and it is infrequent.

Score: 7.2 / 10

The archetype is built, not evoked. The double bears the plot: Tom becomes Dickie, writes in his hand and wears his rings, and the late movement requires him to kill the double in order to become himself again, with a fortune. Behind it stands the American confidence man and the self-made man of the national myth, here made literal and murderous: a young man without a past who makes himself a gentleman by theft, the pattern of The Great Gatsby without Gatsby’s dream, and with the dream’s luck. The innocent abroad is turned over, for the American in Italy is the corrupter, not the corrupted. And Ripley himself has entered the culture’s vocabulary as the type of the charming killer. What holds the axis below the gate is that these patterns are built without being deepened into a cosmos: there is no sacred or fated order behind Tom’s luck, only luck, and the myth is a social myth rather than a mythic one.

Score: 8.2 / 10

The departure is real, and it was a risk. The crime novel Highsmith inherited, the British puzzle and the American hard-boiled alike, solved the crime and punished it, and the American screen of 1955 worked under a code that required the punishment. Highsmith made the criminal the sole point of view, made the reader his accomplice, and let him go free and rich; and she did it, in 1955, in a book whose desire between men is legible though never stated. The turn and the stake are both there. What holds the axis a tenth below the gate is the means. The swerve is not formal in the modernist sense: the narration is linear, the third person close, the prose plain, and the turn lies in moral design and point of view. Against works whose departure is in the form itself, that is a limit.

Score: 8.4 / 10

Change the form and the book loses what it knows. Told from Dickie’s side or from Marge Sherwood’s, or by a narrator who could judge, it would be a story about a murder. Told from inside Tom without relief, it is a story about complicity, because the reader must want Tom to survive in order to go on reading him, and the form makes that wanting unavoidable. The suspense is the moral instrument: every near miss, Marge at the door, Freddie on the stairs, the policemen at the palazzo, is engineered so that the reader’s relief is Tom’s. In few genre novels is the form so nearly the knowledge. What holds the axis there is that the instrument is single: one point of view and one engine of suspense, sustained rather than developed, and used in the last chapters as it is used in the middle.

Score: 8.2 / 10

The book has yielded on return for seventy years, and the evidence is in the readings it has carried: as a crime novel; as a study of the psychopath; as a closeted love story, a reading that came to the surface with time and that the text supports without forcing; as a novel of class and of Americans in postwar Europe; and as an instance of the reader’s complicity. Three screen versions read it three ways. René Clément’s Plein Soleil (1960) punishes Tom; Anthony Minghella’s film of 1999 brings the desire forward; the television series of 2024 brings forward the solitude and the labour of the crime. The book has more in it than one reading exhausts. It yields less on the formal side: the prose and the structure do not draw sustained re-examination, and its meanings, once seen, stay seen.

Score: 8.0 / 10

The field is American fiction of the 1950s, and within it the crime and suspense novel. The force is a real reorganisation of the genre’s possibilities: the murderer as the reader’s companion and his escape as the ending, done once and with full conviction. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Highsmith extended the figure through four more novels, from Ripley Under Ground (1970) to Ripley Under Water (1991), and made the crime novel’s first serial antihero who is neither detective nor punished; the line of charming or sympathetic killers in later fiction and film runs through him; in France the book shaped a whole idea of the psychological crime novel and of Highsmith as its author; and three screen versions carried it into another medium. What holds the axis below the gate is its object: the pressure fell on a genre and its successors, not on the novel as an art, and literary fiction is not written differently for it.

Score: 8.3 / 10

The highest of the twelve. Seventy-one years are weighed as seventy-one, at the foot of the step that runs from seventy years to two centuries. The text survives whole, as published, without a problem of variants. It has been continuously in print and widely translated since 1955, read inside and outside the academy, adapted three times for the screen across six decades, and its hero’s name is in common use; that presence earns at most a tenth, and fame and films are presence, not proof. The surface is fixed to its moment in its means, ocean liners, traveller’s cheques, a world in which a forged signature and a passport photograph could carry a man across Italy, but not in its matter, and the period has worn into the book’s character rather than dated it. What holds the axis at the foot of its step is that the presence leans toward the films and the figure, and the book is read more than it is taught.

Score: 9.0 / 10

The command of the medium is uneven, and instructively so. The plotting is masterly: the management of information, the timing of each danger, the economy with which a forged letter or a missing ring becomes a threat or a resource. The control of point of view is complete; it never slips out of Tom. The prose is plain, functional and often flat, by design and also by limit. It carries Tom’s anxiety by repetition and accumulation, which works, but it lacks the life at the level of the sentence that the finest novels of a single consciousness have, and it is capable of clumsiness and of explaining what Tom feels when the scene has already shown it. The dialogue is serviceable rather than distinctive, and the minor figures, Marge and Freddie, are drawn with a contempt that sometimes thins them. The making bears weight in the structure, not in the sentence.

Score: 8.0 / 10

One law governs the whole: the world as Tom sees it, in which people are read by their things, and a sufficiently exact performance of things is a person. The two most distant elements, the shabby New York of the first chapters and the palazzo in Venice of the last, obey it: the same man doing the same thing on a larger scale, with the same terror of discovery at both ends. The tone holds from first chapter to last, a comedy of manners with a corpse under it. The charge is luck. The book’s physics lets chance fall Tom’s way more often than its own realism should allow: the slowness of the Italian police, the credulity of the American detective Alvin McCarron, Herbert Greenleaf’s acceptance of the will. Highsmith makes the luck part of the law, for the world favours the confident, and Tom’s own surprise at it is part of the fear at the end. That is a real answer, and a partial one.

Score: 8.2 / 10

The orders held are a consciousness; class and money; the family at the edges, in the Greenleafs’ grief and in Aunt Dottie; the law as policing; Americans in Europe as a social fact; and art, as taste and as a commodity that Tom covets and at which Dickie fails. They are integrated, not listed: each enters through Tom’s want. Absent or thin are labour, except as its avoidance; the state beyond the police; history, for the war is a decade gone and barely felt in Italy; the sacred; and the natural order, for the sea is a stage and an instrument. The book is narrow by intention, one mind and its objects, and the figure describes the form rather than faulting it. What holds the axis there is that narrowness: the world the book encompasses is the world Tom can covet.

Score: 7.3 / 10