The Talented Mr. Ripley is a story that captivated my curiosity in high school. I watched it once in my early twneties and haven’t seen it since. Fast forward, and I follow a very talented creator, Mina Le, who basks an online book club and this was the book of the month. I don’t know if I didn’t realize the story was a book or if that knowledge just escaped me, but once I heard that title once more, I knew I wanted to read it right away. Now, in my thirties, that curiosity for this psychological crime drama still remains. Here’s my book talk on The Talented Mr. Ripley by Patricia Highsmith.
A Little Bit About Our Author
Patricia Highsmith was an American novelist and short story writer widely known for her psychological thrillers, including her series of five novels featuring the character Tom Ripley. She wrote 22 novels and numerous short stories in a career spanning nearly five decades, and her work has led to more than two dozen film adaptations. Her writing was influenced by existentialist literature and questioned notions of identity and popular morality. She was born in Fort Worth Texas in 1921 and passed away in Switzterland in February of 1995.
A Little Bit About The Book
The Talented Mr. Ripley is the first book in a series of 5 books where we meet the young and suave, Tom Ripley, a young striver seeking to leave behind his past as an orphan bullied for being a “sissy.” Newly arrived in the heady world of Manhattan, Ripley meets a wealthy industrialist who hires him to bring his playboy son, Dickie Greenleaf, back from gallivanting in Italy. Soon Ripley’s fascination with Dickie’s debonair lifestyle turns obsessive as he finds himself enraged by Dickie’s ambivalent affections for Marge, a charming American dilettante, and Ripley begins a deadly game.
Book Talk
The Talented Mr.Ripley is a tale as old as time, and probably the first of it’s kind. We get to see the psychological hoops one will go through in order to justify their murder and fully immersing themselves in the role of another that they are playing. While there is no actually going into the depths of the disorder the Tom Ripley possesses, we still get a great insight into his mind and why he does his dirty deeds.
Our main character is both the stories protagonist and antagonist, and our author does an immense job of making the reader become fascinated with him through the good and the bad. Sure, he killed a couple of people he shouldn’t have and committed fraud and used vital police resources, but Tom is more complex than that. He’s a closeted gay man who was never really shown love by his providers and lives a very poor life in New York City. Now he comes into money, a trip of a lifetime, and all the glitz and glams of a different life, who wouldn’t slightly, if not fully, root for him to not meet his demise?
Our other characters are also fascinating and complex people. We have Dickie, the man Tom admires, likes, and wants to emulate, but he isn’t perfect. Dickie has wealth, he has a house in a little Italian village, he paints, he has a girlfriend, and he gets paid through his trust fund every month. Dickie, also doesn’t know what he really wants with his life and doesn’t really know who he truly is, and he never gets to explore himself. We also have Marg, Dickie’s girlfriend, who knows what she wants, and she desperately wants Dickie to want the same things. And of course we have Mr. Greenleaf, Dickie’s dad, who is so rich and so easily manipulated that I chuckled at the end when everything went right over his head.
That was my only complaint about the whole story. It feels like the authorities, the detective, Marg, and Mr.Greenleaf all incompetent. The clues to who committed Dickie’s murder is right there, but NONE of them can seem to open their minds to that possibility. I was awaiting for one of them to get suspicious, but it never feels like any of them are, even though Tom feels that way, which make it seem a little silly to me.
Overall, I thoroughly enjoyed my time diving into the world of Mr.Ripley. It’s a fun book that’s part psychological, part crime, and part drama. It’s a classic story that deserves to still be read no matter how many modern renditions there come to be. To my surprise, there are more books to this series, so I will more than likely pick those up on another day.
Until next time, Happy Reading!
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