The Ambasadors (1903) & The Talented Mr. Ripley (1955)

"I see it now. I haven't done so enough before - and now I'm too old; too old; too old at any rate for what I see. Oh, I do see, at least; and more than you'd believe or I can express. It's too late. And it's as if the train had fairly waited at the station for me without my having had the gumption to know it was there. Now I hear its faint receding whistle miles and miles down the line. What one loses, one loses; make no mistake about that."

Widely regarded to be Henry James' best novel, The Ambassadors is the story of Lambert Strether, a man who has endured a lifetime of emotional starvation, who finally finds nourishment in Paris. He has been sent by his fiancée to retrieve her wayward son and return him to Wollett, Massachusetts so that he can take control of the family business. Arriving in Paris, however, Strether finds that contrary to the fears of his mother and sister, Chad Newsome has been much improved by his time in Europe. He also falls under the spell of Marie de Vionette, the woman to whom credit is due for Chad's newfound sophistication.

Having realized that he's missed out on the best that life has to offer, Strether switches course and begins encouraging Chad to stay in Europe, which in turn would provide him with an excuse to continue his late in life awakening. It also inspires Mrs. Newsome to send a new set of ambassadors, this time in the form of Chad's sister, Sarah, and her husband. Sarah is the antithesis of Strether, sees ugliness in all that he has found beautiful, and her arrival essentially signals the end of Strether's engagement to her mother. In a way Strether has now been made free, however the things he has yet to learn about Europe (and himself) will ultimately make it impossible for him to stay behind and he finds himself forced to return to the United States.

The story of The Ambassadors is relatively small; it's a story of manners, a story without a great deal of plot movement. With James, however, it expands into a whole universe of impressions due to his tendency to pack each and every sentence to capacity. His prose is ornate but never tiresome and the novel contains passages of incredible beauty and finely, exquisitely constructed characters. Though I ultimately prefer The Golden Bowl, James' follow-up novel, The Ambassadors has a lot to recommend it.

"It was a good idea to practice jumping into his own character again, because the time might come when he would need to be in a matter of seconds, and it was strangely easy to forget the exact timbre of Tom Ripley's voice. He conversed with Marge until the sound of his own voice in his ears was exactly the same as he remembered it."

Patricia Highsmith's The Talented Mr. Ripley borrows the germ of its premise from James, sending her protagonist to Europe in order to bring home an errant son. In setting the stage for the plot, Highsmith even tacitly acknowledges the debt, writing, "Mr. Greenleaf was chuckling again, asking him if he had read a certain book by Henry James." It is here, however, that the similarities end, as in all other respects sociopathic Tom Ripley has nothing in common with poor, gentle Lambert Strether. Ripley is all ruthless envy, raging Id, selfish desire.

As The Talented Mr. Ripley opens, Ripley is in New York, feeling the heat from a tax scam that he's sure is about to get busted. When the opportunity arises to sail to Europe on Mr. Greenleaf's dime, he leaps at it and sets off to reacquaint himself with Dickie Greenleaf. He falls in love with Dickie's life (and, perhaps, with Dickie himself) and when it looks as though his access is about to be cut off, he does what to him seems most logical: he murders Dickie and takes over his identity. Unfortunately one murder leads to another and Ripley's double life quickly begins to unravel.

One of the most intriguing aspects of Highsmith's writing is that she's so utterly sympathetic to her villainous character. She wants him to be rewarded for his amorality and since we experience the story from his point of view, experience that sense of the walls closing in at each turn of the plot, we can't help but feel relief when he escapes - though, like Ripley, we know that relief is temporary. Ripley "gets away" with it but he does so knowing that he'll spend the rest of his life looking over his sholder, expecting the other shoe to finally drop. The Talented Mr. Ripley is a masterpiece of tension and Ripley one of the great hero/villains of fiction.

The Price of Salt (1952)

"It was an evening Therese would never forget, and unlike most such evenings, this one registered as unforgettable while it still lived. It was a matter of the bag of popcorn they shared, the circus, and the kiss Carol gave her back of some booth in the performers' tent. It was a matter of the particular enchantment that came from Carol... and seemed to work on all the world around them, a matter of everything going perfectly, without disappointments or hitches, going just as they wished it to."

Often, works that are described as “groundbreaking” on their initial release lose their edge as the years. They pave the way for other work, work that goes further and, as such, they can end up seeming almost quaint from the distance of a few decades. This is not the case with The Price of Salt, Patricia Highsmith’s novel (written under the pseudonym Claire Morgan) about a relationship between two women. Frank and unapologetic, it remains a compelling read.

It begins with a look, when Therese spots Carol across a department store floor. It’s a new sensation for Therese and she pursues it blindly, stumbling into it without entirely knowing what to expect. Carol, older and married with a child, is more relaxed and more experienced; she’s cooler and more in control of herself and the situation. What begins as a highly charged friendship officially blossoms into more as the two embark on a cross country trip together. By the time they realize that they’re being pursued by a private investigator hired by Carol’s husband, it’s too late; they’re in too deep and the PI has had ample opportunity to gather evidence. Carol finds herself in the position of having to choose between Therese and her daughter and Therese embarks on a painful journey of self discovery.

Highsmith’s style is efficient and to the point, but not without grace. There are passages of great narrative power and the relationship between Therese and Carol is layered and complex. Though there is always an erotic undercurrent to the way Therese and Carol interact, in the beginning there is also an unmistakeable maternal element. Carol treats Therese almost like a child (her own child, perhaps, from whom she is separated) and Therese submissively accepts it, allowing Carol to slip into the role that Therese’s own mother forfeited. Part of Therese’s journey involves shedding her childlike persona and becoming someone who can relate to Carol adult to adult. This transition paves the way for the novel’s happy ending, the first of its kind in stories dealing with queer themes, and makes it all the more resonant. I first read the book about a year ago and it remains just as achingly compelling on the second read, which I find is only rarely the case with books. Simply put, it's a great work that deserves to be rediscovered by readers.

The Talented Miss Highsmith (2010)

"The 'truth' of Pat's life... is misrepresented by the long lines of dates and hours, the crisp lists of appointments and appearances, the solid sense of case histories completed, that make chronological biography such convential reading - and such conventional comfort, too. Except in her aspirations, Pat Highsmith was never a conventional woman - and was never, ever a conventional writer."

If there is one thing that Joan Schenkar's comprehensive biography of Patricia Highsmith isn't, it's "conventional." Schenkar unfolds the facts of Highsmith's life in a non-chronological fashion, organizing the facets of the writer's life into sections and jumping back and forth in time as it suits her (though there is also an appendix which reiterates the information in chronology order). This works not only to bring a tight focus to every aspect of Highsmith's life, it also somewhat unsettles the reader by making it difficult to find your footing, a feeling that puts you perfectly in the mood to read about Highsmith, whose fiction is rooted so deeply in the dark and the sinister.

Schenkar spends a fair bit of time examining Highsmith's complicated romantic entanglements with many women and a few men, but The Talented Miss Highsmith never becomes a gossip book by virtue of the fact that Schenkar is constantly tying Highsmith's love life back to her work. Her relationships - often dramatic and inspiring violent thoughts - did not just feed her work, but were so essential to her ability to work that her writing sometimes suffered for lack of a relationship to help give shape to her life. The picture Schenkar paints is of a woman drawn to nastiness who has more than a little in common with her protagonists, most of whom have murder on their minds. It's a very dark portrait though, at its core, there is also a deep appreciation for the work that made Highsmith famous.

Schenkar does an excellent job at examining how Highsmith's works came into being and, without being overbearing in doing so, makes a solid case that European readers (who embraced Highsmith's work) recognized something that somehow escaped North American readers, who mostly relegated her to the arena of genre writers instead of literary talents. This is not to say that The Talented Miss Highsmith is blindly adoring of its subject - Schenkar maintains objectivity and is frank about the shortcomings of several of Highsmith's works, particularly the later ones - but simply that it belies the notion that so-called suspense writing is somehow a lesser form of fiction. I can't imagine someone finishing this biography without feeling inspired to seek out some of Highsmith's fiction, which is perhaps the highest compliment you can give to a biography of a writer. With its engaging style and fascinating subject, The Talented Miss Highsmith is a book you won't be able to put down and that you'll want to start reading again the moment you finish it.