How The Talented Mr. Ripley Foretold Our Era of Grifting – The New York Times

THE MAIN THING about impersonation, Ripley muses midway through the novel, after having acquired some expertise in the field, was to maintain the mood and temperament of the person one was impersonating. Both the novel and Minghella s chillingly decorative film begin with a case of misidentification: The nondescript Ripley is taken by the shipbuilding magnate Herbert Greenleaf for an Ivy League classmate of his wayward son, Richard, known as Dickie. Dispatched to a small Mediterranean town in southern Italy to retrieve him, Ripley is seduced by Greenleaf s languorous life of martini lunches and afternoons on the beach. It s hard to know which Ripley wants more: to sleep with Greenleaf or to be Greenleaf, who has a boat, a closet full of bespoke clothing and a beautiful signet ring not to mention the kind of assurance of a man who believes he deserves what he has and will always have more. (What he doesn t have is talent: In the novel, Greenleaf is the kind of amateur artist who paints sunsets in his girlfriend s eyes; in the film, he s a jazz aficionado.) Highsmith never overplays her hand in winning our sympathies for Ripley, but the ironic tension of the setup is clear enough. Who is really the fraud, the empty-headed playboy who gets by on connections and unearned income, or the unprivileged striver? Once Ripley bludgeons Greenleaf to death with an oar on a boating trip, covering his tracks and assuming his victim s identity, the real mystery isn t who committed the crime but why we can t help rooting for him. Some readers might even go so far as to identify with Ripley, including those of us who grew up as code-switchers, or who have, metaphorically or otherwise, built new lives on foreign shores.

via www.nytimes.com

I really like Patricia Highsmith though I’m pretty sure she’s a bad moral influence.