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Comment by slibhb | Hacker News Reader

I quite like Highsmith's novels. Wikipedia quotes someone as describing her as a "lesbian with a misogynist streak" which seems about right. I think that conflict comes through in the article: she was attracted to women but didn't like them and felt exactly the opposite toward men.

She was supposedly very funny and offbeat. I love this passage (also from wikipedia):

> Highsmith bred about three hundred snails in her garden at home in Suffolk, England. Highsmith once attended a London cocktail party with a "gigantic handbag" that "contained a head of lettuce and a hundred snails" which she said were her "companions for the evening."

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I was quite obsessed with the five novels featuring Tom Ripley when I was in my twenties; before the Matt Damon movie happened. They are really good thriller novels and they kind of suck you in with the way she plays with notions of good and evil by making you root for what is basically a sociopath murderer. Characterizing her as some kind of gay icon detracts from the fact that these books weren't really about that. There's hardly any kind of sex or intimacy in them at all.

If anything, they might leave you wondering whether she was more trans than lesbian. Most of her protagonists are male and heterosexual (except for one of her last novels portraying a gay protagonist with aids). Women are portrayed like accessories rather than developed characters. I don't think she actually did any female protagonists at all. Tom Ripley's relationship with his spouse is definitely very cold (he has one from the second novel onwards) and weirdly a-sexual (e.g. they have separate bed rooms even).

There have been several movies based on the Tom Ripley novels that definitely portray him either as practically gay or at least very confused on that front. The Matt Damon one by Anthony Minghella is probably the most famous but arguably also the worst interpretation since it is all about guilt. There was one featuring John Malkovic loosely based on Ripley's Game that captured the cold psychopath a bit better and another one by Wim Wenders featuring Dennis Hoppers based on the same novel that had a very different spin on that. And there are a couple more obscure ones. Mostly those movies miss the main point of the character: he's egocentric, manipulative and ultimately sleeps like a baby without any guilt whatsoever once he's done murdering whoever stops him from that. All the tension in the books is about avoiding getting caught, which usually leads to additional victims. Not very compatible with the average Hollywood movie of course but it makes for an interesting anti hero.

> I don't think she actually did any female protagonists at all.

Of course there's Therese, the well-developed protagonist of The Price of Salt (aka Carol), a lesbian romance. This work and its movie adaptation are the reason she's a gay icon - both are popular and well-loved.

Highsmith published The Price of Salt under a pseudonym after her success with "Strangers on a Train", which is driven by the masculine characters you mention. From what I can tell, The Price of Salt is more directly based on her personal life, or rather her fantasies, and part of the reason she used a pseudonym is that her agent warned her that writing a lesbian novel would be career suicide. Wikipedia has more here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Price_of_Salt "Highsmith described the character of Therese as having come "from my own bones"."

I find the fact that it got popular because of it being one of the only lesbian novels with a somewhat happy ending really interesting. From Wikipedia:

> Because of the happy (or at least, non-tragic) ending which defied the lesbian pulp formula, and because of the unconventional characters who defied stereotypes about female homosexuals, The Price of Salt was popular among lesbians in the 1950s and continued to be with later generations. It was regarded for many years as the only lesbian novel with a happy ending.

Before reading the article I actually only knew Patricia Highsmith from The Price of Salt as it's really popular, even more so after the movie adaptation.

Interesting, never realized that book even existed.

I like the Ripley novels too and I agree with you that reading her as a "gay icon" is detrimental. I was commenting on her personality and eccentricities and I would avoid reading those into her books.

> Mostly those movies miss the main point of the character: he's egocentric, manipulative and ultimately sleeps like a baby without any guilt whatsoever once he's done murdering whoever stops him from that. All the tension in the books is about avoiding getting caught, which usually leads to additional victims. Not very compatible with the average Hollywood movie of course but it makes for an interesting anti hero.

I read Tom as a rebuttal to Crime and Punishment.

As far as the adaptations, Ripley's Game is my favorite. Malkovich gets so many good lines. Purple Noon is pretty good too (Alain Delon is great) though the ending is weak.

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