What puzzles and discomfits the community is the fact that Vic never challenges the lovers, nor appears to be jealous, or disturbed by his wife’s loud, rather crude flaunting of herself. Part of the pleasure she gets from this, is the public humiliation of her husband, the fact that everyone is pretty aware that Vic is cuckolded, again and again. Instead she flaunts her come-hither, blowsy seductiveness in public. Most of Vic’s friends are aware that Melinda likes incomers a lot – or at least, MALE incomers. The local community takes care of its own, and is a little parochial, not taking that kindly to incomers. He is very well liked by most of the long-term small-town residents, as though he is of a somewhat introspective disposition, he is helpful and community minded. Vic, whose main enthusiasm is for the rearing and studying of snails (!), is the owner of an independent publishing company, producing high quality niche work, beautifully presented, local history, poetry imprints and the like. Highsmith sets her theatre of marital war in American Dream small town suburbia, a scene of neighbourliness, polite parties, small professional businesses and vaguely arty interests. Whilst neither protagonist – husband Vic, weirdly obsessive compulsive, wife Melinda, aggressive drunk, sexually voracious and irresistible to anyone she sets her sights on, despite her deep unpleasantness – is the kind of person with the flexibility, generosity of spirit or interest in ‘other’ to stand much of a chance to make a healthy relationship with anyone, their individual flaws create a nuclear wasteland of destructive fallout, once brought into contact with each other.
Under the lens of Highsmith’s acerbic, mordant, cynical eye it is both addictively, compulsively tension building, extremely nasty …and very funny. Ripley is an amoral man, in fact, quite evil, but possessed of such charm that the reader, shamefully, wants the horrific man to succeed in his casually violent endeavoursĭeep Water, originally published in ’57, after the first Ripley, but well before later outings, is a stand alone novel, a portrait of a chillingly dysfunctional marriage. I’m very fond of the dark precision of Patricia Highsmith’s writing, and particularly appreciate the discomfort she causes for her readers, in the character of Tom Ripley.
A creepy, violent, witty tale of a marriage gone feral
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