A Suspension of Mercy

Most mystery novels published today follow recipes so tried and true that one cannot but marvel that people still savor them and lick their lips. The mystery is the most elemental of plots, a natural sentiment demonstrated by our own ignorance of the universe and its secrets, yet the novel is startlingly young. Taking (as is often agreed upon) this famous story as its inception, we have only had mysteries for somewhat less than two centuries. Now I am no fan of the plain whodunits that I devoured as a fourteen-year-old because the writing is generally ignored for the sake of momentum, the characters are all stock agents selected for their ability to facilitate that momentum, and the ending is always a bow tied far too prettily to reflect life's incongruities. So even if your neighborhood bookstores disagree in their filing, one should never really call the author of this novel a mystery writer.

Our protagonist is Sydney Bartleby, a twenty-nine-year-old American writer married to Alicia, a somewhat younger British woman who understands her husband because she paints. At least this is the basic assumption made of a couple who devote themselves to the liberal pursuit of creativity. America in the 1950s was apparently not sufficiently inspirational for the fine arts, so although the two meet in the States they quickly take up residence in Suffolk, England for the peace and quiet that can be so detrimental to the young who normally thrive on agitation. This basic premise – two (as we find out, quite immature) young people choosing a rustic retreat over the thrills of London – does not count among the most likely of situations, especially since Sydney has modest talent and Alicia far less. At one dinner they are observed by their elderly neighbor, Mrs. Lilybanks:   

Sydney was a nervous type, perhaps better fitted to be an actor than a writer. His face could show great changes of feeling, and when he laughed, it was a real laugh, as if he enjoyed it to his toes. He had black hair and blue eyes, like some Irish. But he was not a happy man, that she could see. Financial worries, perhaps. Alicia was far more easygoing, a bit of a spoiled child, but probably just the kind of wife he needed in the long run. But the Polk-Faradays were still better matched, looked as if they sang each other's praises constantly, and now were gazing into each other's eyes as if they had just met and were falling in love. And the Polk-Faradays were raising three small children, children raising children, Mrs. Lilybanks felt, and yet she and Clive had been no older when their two had been born.

The Polk-Faradays, Alex and Hittie, are a nice, plump couple (Hittie the wife is repeatedly referred to as something akin to "a blond Chinese") who seem as content and well-fed as Sydney and Alicia have grown loathsome to one another in their two years of acrimony. Sydney and Alex have been collaborating on a series of failed television scripts – those days, there was nothing newer than television – and Alicia hardly conceals her Schadenfreude for her husband's disappointment. A fact not lost on Sydney, who then does what any budding writer might try: he plans his wife's murder.

In a normal detective novel, such plotting would be a lurid, hairy affair mired with unnecessary obstacles and paranoid reasoning. But for all his temper – Sydney, by his own admission, had struck Alicia "once or twice" and early on there is a violent scene over a cup – we note that Sydney is a cool customer, calmer than his nervousness would suggest, and possessor of a very clear, methodical brain. We also learn that he has been considering all his bloody options for quite a while:

Sometimes he plotted the murders, the robbery, the blackmail of people he and Alicia knew, though the people themselves knew nothing about it. Alex had died five times at least in Sydney's imagination. Alicia twenty times. She had died in a burning car, in a wrecked car, in the woods throttled by person or persons unknown, died falling down the stairs at home, drowned in her bath, died falling out the upstairs window while trying to rescue a bird in the eaves drain, died from poisoning that would leave no trace. But the best way, for him, was her dying by a blow in the house, and he removed her somewhere in the car, buried her somewhere, then told everyone that she had gone away for a few days, maybe to Brighton, maybe to London. Then Alicia wouldn't come back. The police wouldn't be able to find her. Sydney would admit to the police, to everyone, that their marriage hadn't been perfect lately, and that perhaps Alicia had wanted to run away from him and change her name, maybe even go to France on a false passport – but the last was sort of wild, France involving complications not in character with Alicia.

Later it is revealed that Alicia suffers from a fear of flying, making her absconding to France all the less likely. What happens next, however, is one of the more remarkable experiments in fiction of any kind because it is so undeniably clever. The spouses have another bitter squabble and Alicia does indeed leave without specifying the destination; the departure is captioned as a move to benefit both partners, who really have no business being together. One is always a tad surprised that any woman could stay with an abusive lout, especially as Alicia is the only child of a very well-off couple who naturally disapprove of Sydney and his travails.  But Alicia does not think much of herself, perhaps because she does not really think much of her parents and their dapper and prim ways. She leaves to Brighton, or somewhere near Brighton, and does not report back. Sydney, adhering to their alleged bargain, refuses to try to contact her. Even when Alicia's influential parents get the police to interrogate Sydney and inquire about a rug he recently purchased – and buried.

Sydney's tale could have been made up from whole cloth, but we never quite know until the end and even then a few inconsistencies might point to an alternative interpretation. With virtuoso pacing the novel shuttles between Sydney, alone and highly productive with both his third novel, The Planners (the first two were not reprinted), and a macabre spy serial called The Whip, and Alicia's peregrinations. Apart from a lengthy synopsis of a Whip episode, Highsmith does not give us much of these texts, but they can be readily imagined. Sydney has particular trouble with The Planners although he is an experienced novelist, thanks in no small part to a belief antithetic to those of the mystery writer: 

He had never had much respect for plot, mainly because he thought in real life people were more separate than connected, and the connection of three or more people in a novel was an artifice of the author, who ruled out the rest of the world because it did not contribute.

Since I have never read a review of A Suspension of Mercy, I cannot say whether this is the novel's most-quoted passage, but it is certainly the most relevant. Sydney regards real life as a series of tasks that may or may not provide him with enough material to become a successful writer. Even lovemaking with Alicia is construed as laborious, and we never get a hint that he might utilize some of those experiences in his work, a sign of the prudishness of the times or, of course, something else. Perhaps that month off will do Alicia some good after all.  

Strangers on a Train

He felt two forces, one that would move the arm and another that would not, balancing themselves so perfectly his arm was not even tense.

Have we all plotted murder in our minds? It seems like harsh Philistinism to assent to such a claim; yet we have all had our share of enemies, from the schoolchild bully who reappears as the workplace gossip or the ferociously jealous sibling of a friend or beau. The fact is that few of us have pleased everyone; fewer still have remained unscathed from the welts and scars that terrestrial life begets. As children we found it convenient to dispose of our daydreamed foes; but as adults pangs of conscience, a feeling as nebulous as karma (which, if it exists as I believe it does, is simply the boomerang of moral law), and other such qualms usually whisper that these are dark alleys down which we should not venture. Yet what if, in the bloody thrall of a childish daydream while in the body of a law-abiding adult, we come across a being who proposes a diabolic pact to rid ourselves of the person we loathe? An old question, perhaps, but one explored magnificently in this classic novel.  

The young man who would be our hero if it weren't for some serious character flaws is a budding architect by the name of Guy Haines. Guy is twenty-six, "five-foot nine, and one hundred forty pounds," a small, slender man whose nervousness is not mitigated by his awesome coffee consumption ("ten cups a day," he at one point confesses). His ambition involves nothing less than becoming the greatest architect in America, a desire fueled more by energy and talent than competitiveness: he is passionate about architecture, loves working, and, according to everyone else (Guy will pendulate violently between self-doubt and self-exaltation), could be the most talented young architect anyone has ever seen. If this premise sounds a tad overweening, there lurks a commensurate payoff: Guy has a devil of a wife, Miriam, a plague upon his body and mind, who will not so nonchalantly agree to a divorce. Miriam is cruel, vulgar, and promiscuous (a long-faced, married playboy called Steve initially triumphs over a slew of lesser rivals, although he too will be overthrown) – which should tell you something about Guy. But she is also nubile and cunning, as she must be to overcome such frailties. And in their brief span together Miriam certainly succeeded in carving Guy hollow:

The word 'marriage' lingered in Guy's ears ... it was a solemn word to him. It had the primordial solemnity of holy, love, sin. It was Miriam's round terra-cotta-colored mouth saying, 'Why should I put myself out for you?' .... It was Miriam turning from the tall, thin window in the room in Chicago, lifting her freckled, shield-shaped face directly up to his as she always did before she told a lie, and Steve's long dark head, insolently smiling .... He saw the afternoon in Chicago, framed by the doorway of his room, the image grey and black now like a photograph. The afternoon he had found them in the apartment, like no other afternoon, with its own color, taste, and sound, its own world, like a horrible little work of art. Like a date in history fixed in time. Or wasn't it just the opposite, that it traveled with him always?

Guy is professedly a man of faith, which may not be surprising (his conscience will run a decathlon), but Guy is a man of many things. And while the afternoon "like no other afternoon" might remind a reader of Emma Zunz's tragedy as the sole and eternal occurrence, Guy's destiny is sealed when, on an otherwise uneventful train trip, he meets a tall, alcoholic psychopath from Texas called Charles Anthony Bruno. 

That Bruno is insane can be surmised from this first encounter, which showcases one of the more famous offers in modern literature: Bruno will kill Miriam if Guy will do away with Bruno's greedy and unloving father. This trade scheme of unrelated murders is admittedly not very original, having been lifted from numerous noir paperbacks you and I will never read. Yet to Guy, whose last name recollects the French word for hate just as his first name, also French, makes him an average among equals, merely the thought of Miriam dead is so delicious that he has lunch with Bruno as a sort of vicarious pleasure. Some critics would emphasize the career enhancement opportunity stymied by Miriam's presence, a detail I will not spoil; others might think Guy's current girlfriend, Anne, who will make a legitimate run at the title of Longest-Suffering Significant Other, is reason enough to hope for an end to Miriam's days. But an odd passage when Guy is with Anne and her parents in Mexico City suggests something else at work:

He was staying at the Hotel Montecarlo .... One entered it through a wide carriage drive, paved in black and white like a bathroom floor. This gave into a huge dark lobby, also tile floored. There was a grotto-like bar-room and a restaurant that was always empty. Stained marble stairs wound around the patio, and going up behind the bellhop yesterday, Guy had seen, through open doorways and windows, a Japanese couple playing cards, a woman kneeling at prayer, people writing letters at tables or merely standing with a strange air of captivity. A masculine gloom and an untraceable promise of the supernatural oppressed the whole place, and Guy had liked it instantly.

The chessboard floor tiles, "playing cards," "captivity," empty restaurant," and "untraceable promise of the supernatural" all echo the fateful dinner with an evil man he should have avoided, a gambler not unlike the God of Bargains. The woman at prayer may be Guy's mother, or even Bruno's (Bruno will be portrayed as having an unhealthy interest in his mother's looks), and the black-and-white aspect, the suggestion of both newsprint headlines and strict categories, may be understood as corrosive to Guy's mind. Two images, however, extrude the "stained marble stairs," foreshadowing a hideous crime, and the "masculine gloom," the smell of war, of killing your brothers, of the endless protection of endless things, both of which stand in contrast to what Guy really wants – a wife, family, and home. The path to achieve such goals is undoubtedly facilitated by Miriam's bizarre murder, a murder not so much witnessed as sensed by a few of her libertine friends. A murder that so conveniently takes place when her husband is still in the land of Aztecs, Mayas, and very gloomy hotels. Bruno does not delay in refreshing Guy's memory of their little chat – on the train Guy carelessly left behind his personalized copy of Plato's works – and our game has begun.

Cinéastes recur with pleasure to the film based on our novel, but the two works' discrepancies are so glaring as to beggar belief. Hitchcock's Guy is not an architect, but an "amateur tennis star," which makes so little sense for a number of reasons that we had best forget about it. Other alterations, however, are far less pardonable: Guy cannot alibi for himself in Mexico since the action is transferred to the American Northeast corridor, stripping the film of its heat-induced visions and sleazy sultriness; a feeble political undercurrent is generated – 1950s America, like its present version, was infested with panicmongers – by making Anne's father a United States senator; Anne gets a sister who is mauled by Bruno in a regrettable scene which, alas, triggers even more hare-brained vignettes, including Anne's paying a visit to Bruno's mother; and, perhaps most indicatively, Plato is jettisoned in favor of a cigarette lighter with the initials of a famous amateur tennis player. There is, of course, another difference, one so woeful as to deprive the film of any artistic integrity whatsoever, but we will leave that iniquity for the curious viewer to discover. One of the pleasures of reading Highsmith is her fearless attention to detail: "The voice [was] lewd in the morning, ugly with the complexities of night"; "Like an enormous walnut in feeble, jittery squirrel hands, an idea, bigger and closer than any idea he had ever known, had been revolving in his mind for several days"; "Bruno jumped up and shouted against the roar of her running bath"; "A girl's scream was a long arc in silence and somehow the scream made it final"; "In the mirror his face looked like a battlefield in hell"; "The facts repeated and repeated lost their horror and even their drama for Guy: they were like dull blows of a hammer, nailing the story in his mind forever"; "In the night, one approached truth merely at a certain slant, but all truth was the same"; "When she dabbled her paintbrush fast in a glass of water, the sound was like laughter." And yet the most significant and dazzling of Highsmith's sentences may be one of the shortest: "Every telephone suggested Guy." The suggestion is to Bruno, who "didn't care too much about sleeping with women," deeming such acts "a silly business."  What then is not a silly business?  Well, Guy is not silly, and Guy and Bruno are good friends, aren't they now?  Is that why, upon meeting Anne, Bruno claims he and the architect – who have nothing, absolutely nothing in common – were school mates?  If only Guy were as talented in nature as he is in artifice.

cinéastes

The Talented Mr. Ripley (novel)

Every morning he watched the sun, from his bedroom window, rising through the winter mists, struggling upward over the peaceful-looking city, breaking through finally to give a couple of hours of actual sunshine before noon, and the quiet beginning of each day was like a promise of peace in the future. The days were growing warmer. There was more light, and less rain. Spring was almost here, and one of these mornings, one morning finer than these, he would leave the house and board a ship for Greece.

You may never have considered how you evaluate characters in a work of fiction, but you certainly pass some kind of judgment. For the dreamers among us, there will be a direct correlation between the fictional and real worlds whereby the problems and solutions of one will be transposed into the other. The way in which a character manages his morals should allow you to deselect some of those vapid adventures where "everything is possible" because as one critic noted in a different context, if anything goes then nothing can be funny. How very true. The same can be said of any film or book praised by the irresponsible among us for being "immoral" or "amoral," with some preferring the latter because it seems to involve love. What they are really saying is that they feel repressed by the status quo or normal, good, basic values and this work grants them a fantastic outlet. There is nothing terribly wrong with such a desire provided this outlet is superior to other outlets, which I fear smacks of old-fashioned Victorian dos and don'ts. Good that such simplistic classifications don't really bother the eponymous character of this novel.

Our hero, if that is truly the right word, is first depicted as prey, a role he will come to relish. Whatever we learn of Thomas Ripley in the pages that follow, his innate ability for subterfuge and skulduggery should not be disesteemed. He is tailed into a bar by what turns out to be fortune itself: Herbert Greenleaf, the father of someone he does not know very well has tracked Ripley down as a potential conduit to his self-exiled progeny – if painting and sunbathing in Italy qualify as exile. Words are exchanged that afford the reader far greater insight into Ripley's motives than Greenleaf could ever dream of contemplating and a deal is struck: Ripley is to travel to Europe on Greenleaf's money – the name choice is now painfully clear – to track down Dickie Greenleaf with the aim of homeward persuasion. An odd job for an odd fellow:

A cap was the most versatile of head-gears, he thought, and he wondered why he had never thought of wearing one before? He could look like a country gentleman, a thug, an Englishman, a Frenchman, or a plain American eccentric, depending on how he wore it. Tom amused himself with it in his room in front of the mirror. He had always thought he had the world's dullest face, a thoroughly forgettable face with a look of docility that he could not understand, and a look also of vague fright that he had never been able to erase. A real conformist's face, he thought. The cap changed all that. It gave him a country air, Greenwich, Connecticut, country. Now he was a young man with a private income, not long out of Princeton, perhaps. He bought a pipe to go with the cap.

No other paragraph in The Talented Mr. Ripley more aptly describes its protagonist. So you will not be overmuch surprised to learn what "the world's dullest face" can do when cornered. And cornered he will be when he comes upon Dickie Greenleaf and the nominal woman in his life, Margaret Sherwood.

Margaret, dite Marge, has all the trappings of a standard issue 1950s American sweetheart. Her only added twist are her two distinct ambitions: publishing her book on photography and marrying Dickie Greenleaf. Dickie is indifferent to both these pursuits, but perhaps because his intellect only allows him to remain on the surface of things, be those things emotions, languages, or human psychology. A nice, unintelligent, conventionally handsome fellow of absolutely no talent; and yet Tom never considers that he would have become much like Dickie Greenleaf had he fed from the same silver spoon. The life of the young couple, apparently not yet lovers in the modern sense of the word, is invaded until Tom makes a fateful decision that involves murdering and replacing an indifferent, third-rate painter whose father is patiently awaiting his return stateside. This is done in a boat in San Remo and will foreshadow another murder involving a car at another Italian location, and the plot has all the petrol it will need for a long and high-speed journey. Tom usurps what he wants of Dickie's existence – primarily, the insouciance and principles of easy living – and does not consider the consequences in their dreadful entirety. He learns Italian by studying it with diligence and interest, and continues relentlessly in his attempts to lead a placid post-War life. But he encounters more than a few obstacles: Marge's inquiries, a porcine boor by the name of Freddie Miles, and a platoon of Italian law enforcement officers who resemble each other just as much as Tom looks like Dickie (Tom is actually interviewed in both identities by the same policeman). These omnipresent coppers come off more than once as disturbingly incompetent, an impression unchanged by Herbert Greenleaf's hiring of an American gumshoe to find his vanished son.   

While refraining from acerbic asides, Highsmith directs her genius to the smallest of details with a precision seldom found in modern belles lettres ("They were interrupted for a minute while Mr. Greenleaf saw that they were all seated"; "He stopped in front of an antique shop window and stared for several minutes at a gloomy oil painting of two bearded saints descending a dark hill in moonlight"; "The Via Appica stretched out before him, grey and ancient in the soft lights of its infrequent lamps"). The result is compelling in the same way that all artistic, thoughtful enterprises are compelling: they modulate our own definition of what art is. Ripley may be a sociopath, but the methods with which he hoodwinks and dispatches nuisances (you will never forget the scene with the shoe) speak of a great mind exercising his cerebral precedence over human mediocrity. The tale has been told in many different formats but almost invariably with an amount of disgust for the peon, the ignorant and the uncultured citizen who would never in a thousand moons be able to figure out the machinations of a certain Thomas Ripley. To her credit Highsmith does not pander to this facile conceit, one that is particularly disdained by oversensitive critics who think the author might have in mind these selfsame critics. We end up rooting for Ripley to succeed, and not only because he is smarter than everyone else. He is an atypical underdog, both sexually and intellectually dangerous, and his knocking off of the rich can easily be interpreted in the Robin Hood language we knew as children, bereft of course of the silly Marxist impositions. The difference is that this Robin Hood wants all of Sherwood Forest to himself. 

The original Ripley differs from the dynamic if altered English-language film mainly owing to the engagement of separate agendas. While the film attends to the glamour of Ripley's new world, perhaps as a function of the medium in which he is portrayed, the novel tries to trace, more or less successfully, his moral architecture. I say more or less because there is only so much one can glean from a psyche that yearns for European culture and nonetheless has committed murder. The film also injects much more ado regarding his boat passages that the novel leaves unexplored; specifically, a hint about the character of Peter Smith-Kingsley is realized on the screen. That Mr. Ripley would like to be anyone except Mr. Ripley is overstating the point; what Mr. Ripley would truly like is the ease and fortune that would allow him to be anyone, including an inflated, idealized version of himself, whenever imitation is to his benefit or amusement – which may be the best definition of an actor ever put forth. As evinced by the quote that begins this review, however, there persists a certain pathos to the financially poor and underadvantaged Ripley, a young man who enjoys wallowing in self-pity as much as using his circumstances as undeniable motivation. Believe it or not, indeed. 

Those Who Walk Away

Peggy was very romantic – in a dangerous way. She thought marriage was another world – something like paradise or poetry – instead of a continuation of this world. But where we lived, it couldn't have been more like a paradise. The climate, the fruit on the trees right outside the door. We had servants, we had time, we had sunshine. It wasn't as if we were saddled with children right away and up to the elbows in dishwater.

This novel's title is ultimately explained in a casual aside from our third-person narrator who, we suspect, could have probably devised something saltier. It is only very late in our tale, when the narrator relinquishes her hard-won objectivity to excoriate one of her characters, that we realize the title's appropriateness. The accusation is cowardice, and the accused is a young, rich, intelligent, and decent-looking widower by the name of Rayburn "Ray" Garrett.

Ray has everything a young man could wish for materially, as well as something of infinitely greater importance: a taste and a love for art. He has little to say about literature (he quotes this poem in a fit of passion) or cinema, but this being the 1960s, there may not have been as much access to the plenitude of films now literally at our fingertips. No, Ray's love has always been and always will be painting. It is then a sad discovery, and one that occurs early on in our novel and Ray's fictional existence, that his taste and passion for painting do not extend into any creative talent. That is to say, while Ray Garrett may know a dazzling genius's landscapes and portraitures when he sees them, he cannot possibly mimic their accomplishments. So he is relegated, as are so many professors of English with vast and exquisite libraries, to collecting them. His family's fortune allows him an insouciant existence, one that takes a very unplanned turn when he meets Peggy Coleman. Peggy is even younger and richer than Ray; unlike Ray, however, she has not been afforded the bliss of an unbroken home. Her mother would die young and Peggy grew up with her foul-tempered and hack painter of a father, Edward, who will come to play a far more prominent role in Ray's life than either would ever care to imagine. Especially after almost a year of newlywed bliss, residence on Mallorca with "all the ingredients that were supposed to make a marriage go [–] time, money, a pretty place to live, [and] objectives," Peggy, not yet twenty-two years of age, decides that "the world is not enough," and that getting on in this world is not worth the trouble.

The rest of the novel could easily have comprised Ray's inner thoughts on why this all occurred, a diary, in other words, of his eternal guilt. For very laudable artistic reasons, Highsmith grants us only snippets, distant arias from a world Ray shall never know again. Instead of speculate desperation about someone who remained very much a stranger until her death, Ray digs into his own past, his own shortcomings, with the faint hope of excavating a golden key to his puzzle:

From his father, an oilwell worker in his youth, a self-made man, now a millionaire with an oil company of his own, Ray had inherited wide cheekbones. It was an American face, slightly on the handsome side, hopelessly marred by vagueness, discretion, the second thought, if not downright indecision, Ray thought. He disliked his appearance, and always saw himself leaning slightly forward as if to hear someone who was speaking softly, or as if incipiently bowing, kowtowing, about to retreat backwards. And he felt that because of his parents' money, he had had life too easy.

At first glance this passage may seem rashly composed (witness the echo of "thought" in the second sentence or the pleonastic "retreat backwards"), but this is in all likelihood intentional, the purling brook of worries and images that flow through every mind. A later comment will buttress the notion that Ray's greatest fear involves his own mediocrity, the newness of his family's affluence, and his inability to capitalize on what every artist dreams of having: namely the time and resources to realize his artistic potential. His compromise to himself was to marry a budding painter and establish a gallery of European painters in New York, both of which, of course, substitute a proximity to genius for a share in its creative acts. That Ray ends up in Venice with his former father-in-law, whom he rightly understands as someone of limited artistic ability who has long since forsaken any development in that field so as to cash in on faddish garbage, we must attribute to the conceits of fiction. How and why they will engage in one of the nastiest cat-and-mouse games undertaken by two otherwise well-adjusted citizens, however, we must leave to the curious reader.     

Critics have been predictably dismissive of Those Who Walk Away, perhaps because there are no compelling characters like Tom Ripley to loathe and envy. Yet in one respect, the novel remains one of Highsmith's defining works. You may consider Ripley's harpsichord lessons, leisurely readings in German, French, and Italian literature, and his beautiful French mansion and even more beautiful French wife all indications of high culture and great intelligence, and you may forget that all these niceties swathe a murderous psychopath. Ripley is a marvelously memorable literary creation, one that has been likened to Highsmith herself in her venomous disdain of her birthplace and its social Darwinism, but there is only so much to make of such a comparison. What really drove Highsmith we can only hope to uncover through the medium of her more introspective works, such as the terrible tragedy of Rayburn and Edward. It is in their tale that we find Americans of true artistic sensitivity living in Europe, understated but clear alcoholism, and a certain inability to express oneself fully that is the mark of self-imposed literary exile. The most eloquent words, some of which are quoted at the beginning of this review, are exchanged when the two Americans – one a failed painter, the other a sellout – are not impeded in their locutions by Italians or Edward's French girlfriend Inez. The city of Venice itself assumes the role of hero, an antagonist to both men, whose sins (Ray's being cowardice and, in a way, betrayal, Coleman's being wrath and its explosive consequences) will confound them in the end. So when Ray, who survives more than one brush with death, actually believes he may be dead and that the surrounding realm holds but phantasms and erstwhile joys, he is reminded that Venice's "dark canals were very real." And what could be realer to the weary than time's blackest shroud?

The Blunderer

Walter had a vision of a little window.  It was a beautiful little square window, just out of his reach, filled with light blue sky with a suggestion of green earth below.

Adulthood, you will surely have heard, may be summarized as a series of one's choices (some apply this label to life as a whole; yet in so many instances of our childhood, choices are snatched from our tender fingers), a lovely mantra for your friendly neighborhood Freewill Society.  We are also told by some of the members of this same organization that religious faith is anathema to volition, because the existence of an omnipotent otherness suggests that our fates are already carved out in some dark and distant cave for us, sooner or maybe much later, to discover.  These same board members, whose staffing is replicated in a club almost invariably named, in cruel irony, "humanist," will then advance their theories as to why science alone promotes freewill.  Science, that same discipline that claims everything can be determined by genetics, fossils, and other unstoppable forces well beyond human direction.  Scientists have made some incredible leaps the last century and a half, but they increasingly jump without a moral compass or parachute, instead electing to manipulate whatever earthbound relics to their own evanescent theories.  The fact of the matter is, one can only exhibit freewill when there is a moral dilemma, because otherwise what we might term "volition" quickly devolves into a synonym for "convenience," or, in dire times, "survival."  Being moral means choosing what is right before the ledgers and balance sheets of ease and self-preservation are perused.  A fine way to examine the protoganist's ordeal in this novel.

That protagonist is New York attorney Walter Stackhouse, and from our first scenes with him we understand he will also become – or perhaps has always been – the title character.  Walter is married to a petite, pretty, and squirrelly real estate agent by the name of Clara, and we would do well at this point to recur to that old adage about judging a man by his wife.  It is unclear to even the casual observer why on earth Walter, physically attractive, well-off, and a respected colleague, would have settled in suburban Connecticut with Clara, who does not seem beautiful enough to justify her behavior.  Neurotic in that way unique to unrepentingly smug and selfish people, Clara is a master hand at that oldest of wifely wiles: driving a wedge between her husband and his male chums ("He had already lost five friends").  Her public and private comportment might even lead one to believe she is trying to induce a divorce (a couple of odd reactions suggest she may be having an affair with one of Walter's friends; a later scene reveals staggering emotional immaturity), which, after a few exhausting years of wedlock, Walter is now ready to give her.  And so, our story would likely have been as tedious and commonplace as a bickering couple were it not for Walter's hobby of chronicling ill-matched pairs:

The essays had been Walter's pastime for the last two years.  There were to be eleven of them, under the general title 'Unworthy Friendships.'  Only one was completed, the one on Chad and Mike, but he had finished the outlines for several others – and they were all based on observations of his own friends and acquaintances.  His thesis was that a majority of people maintained at least one friendship with someone inferior to themselves because of certain needs and deficiencies that were either mirrored or complemented by the inferior friend.  Chad and Mike, for example: both had come from well-to-do families who had spoiled them, but Chad had chosen to work, while Mike was still a playboy who had little to play on since his family had cut off his allowance.  Mike was a drunk and a ne'er-do-well, unscrupulous about taking advantage of all his friends.  By now Chad was almost the only friend left.  Chad apparently thought: 'There but for the grace of God go I,' and doled out money and put Mike up periodically.  Mike wasn't worth much to anybody as a friend.  Walter did not intend to submit his book for publication anywhere.  The essays were purely for his own pleasure, and he didn't care when or if he ever finished them all.       

I give away nothing by mentioning one of The Blunderer's more curious aspects: namely, that as compromising as this diary of sorts could have been, it is summarily discarded early on, never to resurface.  Provided, of course, one didn't understand it as a precursor to a few of Walter's future personal relationships, one of which will be with a dreadful beast, a killer by the name of Melchior Kimmel.

We meet Kimmel in our opening scene, which may remind the attentive reader of this film.  The German immigrant's actions are swift, bloodhot, and premeditated, but they are not foolproof, and anyone who encounters this mammoth bookseller whose "main source of profit" is "pornography" cannot abandon a few initial impressions.  The first is that Kimmel is extremely, almost dangerously intelligent; the second is that he is capable of incredible violence; and the third proffers an explanation for his journey hither:    

Then he stood by his bookcase, playing with his carvings, moving their parts at various angles and observing the composition.  He could see them fuzzily against the light-colored bookcase, and the effect was rather interesting.  They were cigar-shaped pieces fastened invisibly together, end to end, with wire.  Some looked like animals on four legs; others, of ten pieces or more, defied any description.  Kimmel himself had no definite name for them.  To himself, sometimes, he called them his puppies.  Each piece was differently carved with designs of his own invention, designs somewhat Persian in their motifs, their brown-stained surfaces so smoothed with fine sandpaper they felt almost soft to the touch.  Kimmel loved to run his fingertips over them.  He was still fondling them when the doorbell rang. 

It might be relevant to note that Kimmel did not "love to run his fingertips over" his wife, unless you include his wicked actions near that bus rest stop, but there are few greater wastes of time than to ratiocinate with a murderer (anyone who "loved white shirts more than almost any tangible object in the world" likely has a baleful deed or three on his conscience).  In the ensuing two months, Helen Kimmel's slaying remains unsolved but not ignored.  The man officially on the case is police detective Lawrence Corby, who will prove himself in more ways than one to be a worthy opponent.  But a certain Connecticut attorney, unhappily married and a very poor prognosticator of future events, decides to clip an article on Helen Kimmel's demise for his scrapbook.  The same scrapbook that Detective Corby will leaf through once Clara, en route to bury a mother she never loved, does not return to her Pittsburgh-bound bus. 

The Blunderer may not be one of Highsmith's very finest works (nevertheless, a new film version is afoot), but it was also one of her earliest.  Its main flaw, apart from the "Unworthy Friendships" cul-de-sac, is the inclusion at the novel's onset of far too many minor characters, suggesting perhaps that a grander scope was initially intended.  Yet the master's touches can be found on nearly every page: "He felt violently bored and annoyed suddenly, the way he had felt in the Navy a couple of times when he had had to wait too long, naked, for a doctor to come and make a routine examination"; "Not simply hatred, he knew, but a particular tangle of forces of which hatred was only one"; "Even if he fought the whole long way back in words"; "A bitter disappointment in Nathan, like a private inner hell, filled Kimmel's mind, balancing the outer hell of the room"; "His heavy body rolled with his movements, and for a few moments his brain seemed to be concentrated in his fat arms and hands"; and "for Walter simply to be near her for a few moments satisfied a deep craving, like the craving he sometimes felt to lie naked in the sun."  The "her" in this last citation is a young music teacher by the name of Ellie Briess, who may or may not be a figment of his imagination since she is so embarrassingly the opposite of dear old Clara.  Or, for that matter, of dear old Helen Kimmel.