What I Am Reading: "The Talented Mr. Ripley" by Patricia Highsmith

It’s not a summer unless you’ve read an escapist beach thriller, so I went with the classic The Talented Mr. Ripley, which made its way onto my reading list earlier this summer through unremembered means. The book is about a nervous, whimsical, sincere, asexual, paranoid conman who befriends and eventually decides to murder an American living in Italy, then spends some time impersonating the latter to get his money.

I’m not a big reader in this genre, but this book certainly covers a lot of ground in Jet Age Italy; and other than the scenery the book is made memorable by its main character, who went on to anchor additional books in a series. He is endearingly fickle, sometimes embracing his con on a whim, other times feeling the pressure build to a breaking point. He is 41% confidence, 39% nervousness, and 20% blank-eyed homicidal fury. A reader gets so swept up in the first two that it can be easy to forget the third. It is fun to follow him around for a while, and I can see why a reader would want to stick with him in a serialized succession of settings.