Happy New Year, Blog World! Anything goes on this blog, that's the resolution for 2012 - that's my guiding philosophy, opining and discoursing on whatever suits my fancy. Hope you enjoy.
Leave it up to Patricia Highsmith to garner your sympathy and support for a murderer. In 1957's eerie, fun Deep Water, Victor Van Allen is a cuckolded husband who rather enjoys having his wife's lovers over for dinner. He even enjoys killing them. When two of the lovers go missing, his neighbors and friends don't suspect anything; in fact, they side with him, assured of his innocence, not the least of which because they just don't know how he's put up with his wife for so long. But his wife, dear Melinda, is convinced that he Victor did it, certain that there is something a little too smug and easygoing in his humdrum jolliness. Highsmith is dastardly good, brilliant, at making murder the anti-thing, the anti-act, no more a disturbance than having to wait too long at a red light. Her novels are peerelessly psychological - thorough, queasy examinations of slightly off-kilter men sweating out their psychotic acts in normal, suburban surroundings. She's playful, too, fun. These books don't even feel like crime novels.
Here is a far better recommendation for the works of Highsmith (I've read twelve of them), by Robert Towers, critic for the New York Review of Books: "Murder, in Patricia Highsmith's hands, is made to occur almost as casually as the bumping of a fender or a bout of food poisoning. This downplaying of the dramatic... has been much praised , as has the ordinariness of the details with which she depicts the daily lives and mental processes of her psychopaths. Both undoubtedly contribute to the domestication of crime in her fiction, thereby implicating the reader further in the sordid fantasy that is being worked out."
Three of Highsmith's books have been made into movies: Strangers on a Train, The Talented Mr. Ripley, and Ripley's Game.
Short post today. That is all!
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