The Talented Mr. Ripley [Paperback]

In the same way that Vince Gilligan madeThe brilliance of Highsmith's conception of Tom Ripley was her ability to keep the heroic and demonic American dreamer in balance in the same protagonistthus keeping us on his side well after his behavior becomes far more sociopathic than that of a con man like Gatsby.[Highsmith] forces us to re-evaluate the lines between reason and madness, normal and abnormal, while goading us into sharing her treacherous hero's point of view.Mesmerizing...a Ripley novel is not to be safely recommended to the weak-minded or impressionable.The most sinister and strangely alluring quintet the crime-fiction genre has ever produced.[Highsmith] has created a world of her owna world claustrophobic and irrational which we enter each time with a sense of personal danger.[Tom Ripley] is as appalling a protagonist as any mystery writer has ever created.Murder, in Patricia Highsmith's hands, is made to occur almost as casually as the bumping of a fender or a bout of food poisoning. This downplaying of the dramatic... has been much praised, as has the ordinariness of the details with which she depicts the daily lives and mental processes of her psychopaths. Both undoubtedly contribute to the domestication of crime in her fiction, thereby implicating the reader further in the sordid fantasy that is being worked out.Savage in the way of Rabelais or Swift.For eliciting the menace that lurks in familiar surroundings, there's no one like Patricia Highsmith.Highsmith's subversive touch is in making the reader complicit with Ripley's cold logic. Tom Ripley is one of the most interesting characters in world literature. Anthony Minghella, director of the 1999 film