The Talented Mr. Ripley

⚖The case for it

Highsmith makes you complicit and then lets you notice. Readers describe “rooting for Tom, even though he behaves abominably,” and “feel so dirtily complicit in his misdeeds” once they catch themselves at it. Tom works because he is not a criminal mastermind but a frightened, self-deceiving young man “neither as brilliant nor controlled as he believes himself to be.” The prose is stripped to Hemingway leanness under three hundred pages, and the flat reporting voice is where the dread lives rather than in any one scene. Mongibello, Naples, Rome and Venice sit warm and slow around all that tension. Critics call it the “godfather of the modern psychological thriller.”

— the honest librarian

✕The case against

The plot “relies heavily on dumb luck” at every point it could collapse, with officials and bystanders behaving exactly as convenience requires. The opening quarter drags. Marge exists mainly to be irritating and the other women barely exist at all. Modern readers push back on the book tying Tom’s closeted shame to his pathology, uneasy at a portrait “showing such shame regarding his sexual orientation” as though that explained the rest. Even admirers concede there is “no character that the reader really gets attached to,” which leaves a gripping book a cold one.

— the honest librarian

6h

honest hours

9

sittings