This is the third and final article in my series on Patricia Highsmith’s Ripley series. I review the fifth and final of her novels about the homicidal psychopath (it seems cruel to label such a fascinating charmer this way) and write some final thoughts on Ripley’s work. In a separate article, “Patricia Highsmith and Tom Ripley in the Movies,” I’ve covered film treatments and a screenplay based on Anthony Minghella’s “The Talented Mr. Ripley.”
ripley underwater
In “Ripley Underwater,” the fifth and final Tom Ripley novel by Patricia Highsmith, a dangerous, nasty, and disturbed couple, David and Janice Pritchard, have appeared in Tom’s placid French town. They are up to no good, investigating Tom’s past, the disappearance of Murchison, whom Tom had murdered in the cellar of his Belle Ombre home. They have been investigating the forgeries of the Derwatt paintings and Ripley’s association with the late Dickie Greenleaf, the man who inadvertently provided Tom with his wealth and his life of leisure. It’s not easy being Tom Ripley, a man with at least eight or nine murders in his past.
Highsmith frequently jumps right into his narrative and hero’s dilemma, without preamble or waste of time in his hard-hitting, plotting, character-focused style. As always, the wife Eloísa is outside (in Morocco) or indifferent to what she is sweating. She knows her husband is risky work, but he provides her with exactly what she needs, a showcase for her frivolous lifestyle. Tom doesn’t work for a living, but he certainly works hard to avoid detection.
Pritchard, full of innuendo and threats, follows Tom and his wife to Morocco where Tom gives him a good beating. Throughout the book, readers, knowing Tom as a frequent murderer, realize that the Pritchards are skating on very thin ice in pursuing him. Their solution to such problems has often been more homicidal than social. He’s not the kind of man you fool around with. The creepy odd couple, like vultures, fight and fight, a couple straight out of “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”.
Pritchard, a persistently obsessed avenger, gets a boat and a helper and begins methodically trawling the nearby rivers and canals in search of Murchison’s missing body. Every day he goes out fighting for long hours while Tom is wrestling with what to do with this busybody. When a headless corpse turns up, the plot thickens.
This is a perfectly argued book. Highsmith keeps you wondering how Tom will finally deal with the Pritchards, because you know he’ll do whatever he has to, including murder, to survive.
Ripley – In Summary
Looking back at the five-novel canon of Highsmith Ripley novels, we see in Tom Ripley a man who fascinates us, but not a man we can admire or envy for his dubious sense of morality and criminality. He lives a life of leisure, he loves working in his garden, he is an amateur painter, he loves his beautiful house, Belle Ombre, in the French countryside.
He dotes on his beautiful, independent, and wealthy wife, Heloise, who is utterly hedonistic and so into herself that she turns a blind eye to her husband’s misdeeds. Her role is like that of Tony Soprano’s wife, except that Tony’s wife is brave, more inquisitive and more involved, while Heloise is passive.
Tom is a murderer, an impostor, a thief, but still for the reader he is a captivating and captivating character creation. He loves fine art, particularly Derwatt’s work, because his income is derived in part from the sale of forgeries of Derwatt’s work. He loves expensive clothes and fine food and wine. Unfortunately, he is never able to get rid of the bloodstains of a victim named Murchison whom he had murdered in Belle Ombre’s cellar.
Tom is cultured, cultured, self-taught, a man who appreciates the finer things in life, but is he really civilized? At least eight people died by his hand (it’s hard to keep up with his body count), and he drove at least one more to suicide, Bernard Tufts the forger. He had perhaps indirectly driven a second person, teenager Frank Pierson, to suicide by not giving him further advice. He has a killer instinct and a taste for killing which he believes in his cultivated way of life. Perhaps he is analogous to Hitler’s love for Wagner or Wagner’s admiration for Hitler?
Tom lacks conscience, any sense of morality. He sometimes seems able to block out dangerous situations that his friends or even his wife find themselves in. In Book Five he doesn’t even think about the tragedy of his bosom friend Frank in Book Four.
Survival instincts are very strong in Tom. His own level of self-preservation and selfishness often takes the lead. He exhibits a great deal of callousness. He is a risk taker who often skates very close to detection and discovery, but it is almost always Tom against the world, cunning, brutal and sometimes violent, Tom, above all others. He’s the last man standing if need be, but he’s never killed a woman.
Highsmith loved the amorality of his creation, his creature, and she endowed him with a sense of empowerment and the ability to escape capture and walk free. She wanted him to be as free as a bird. I think he was her response to a society she found stultifying, hypocritical, and immoral. Perhaps Tom was her defiant response to what she saw as the world’s immorality and callousness.
Perhaps he broke rules that Highsmith herself hardly believed in. Through him, she could live her own cultured life and mock a society she was unwilling to be a member of. She grew very fond of her cultured creation, for he was a rebel, a fearless rule-breaker, a homicidal monster in a world that might be monstrous in her eyes.
But writing about bad guys is fun, and it was fun for her to have a creation that did what she wanted, what she shouldn’t have done, and yet got away with it because it belonged in her fictional world and she could make it up. own rules for that world.
Highsmith died in 1995, but even now, Tom may still be alive, unpunished, living by his own rules, cultivating his garden and occasionally beating up a person or two who gets in his way.
