4 out of 5

I run rather hot and cold with the Ripley series, but ‘Under Water’ comes close to being how I’d always imagined the character and thus is certainly my favorite entry in the ‘-iad’, though I haven’t read ‘Ripley’s Game’ – book 3 – at this point.  ‘Water’ is so much more balanced pacing-wise and interesting and impactful versus the other books that I’d be tempted to say that this is the only one one needs to read… but I can acknowledge that ‘Water’ works because of the foundation Highsmith slowly (and sometimes ploddingly) built in the 4 previous books.  We need the youthful reactionary from ‘Talented,’ the intended morality of ‘Under Ground,’ the ambivalent killer of ‘Game,’ and even the go-with-the-flow Ripley from ‘The Boy Who Followed…’  All of those character aspects equal the man who deals with nosy neighbors in ‘Ripley Under Water,’ not to mention the book building on plot elements from the first two books, which of course wouldn’t be near as satisfying if we hadn’t read those.  Sigh.

Now while my main contention with Highsmith’s Ripley books is, still, a lack of feeling like there will ever really be consequences for her main characters – in part this is attributed to Tom Ripley’s approach to life, for sure, but it’s also a specific part of the series’ style, this smile-fronted travelogue covering up countless murders as a purposefully juxtaposing dichotomy of good and evil judgments for the reader.  But in part I have to believe its just how Highsmith wrote, the laid-back observer working well for Tom’s voice  This makes Ripley into her Yossarian, whom Heller said would essentially live forever, had there been another sequel to ‘Closing Time.’  And so I made the same guess here, that though ‘Water’ has some pretty high stakes, Ripley would survive smiling at the end.  I think this is fine for Catch-22 because it’s not a thriller, whereas the Ripley books definitely diddle with those elements.  So that’s really my docking of a star here.  At those points where Highsmith had crazy potential to ratchet up the intensity, she would do so only to a point, until a phone call or whimsical decision would wipe most of the worry away.  The last forty pages or so of the book have this lingering feeling… and sure, some of that hanging around pays off, but again, by that point it feels like a wink and a shrug.

That being said, its about 50 pages longer than the other Ripley books, and manages to incite a particularly fun sense of unknowing as to what Ripley will do next for the majority of those pages (minus the lingering) whilst dealing with David and Janice Pritchard, an obsessed and potentially unhinged man who has guessed at Tom’s past and his follow-the-leader wife, bipolar and beaten, smiling while she reports of her husband’s single-minded pursuits.  Basically – it’s the Joker to Tom’s Batman; the insane vs. the calculated.  This is not only a kick because it dredges up (womp, that’s a pun once you read the book…) book one and two ghosts – thereby retconning the lack of consequence in those entries – but because, finally, it adds a dash of mystery to the whole affair (something that the Vintage versions of these books hint at when classifying them as Crime/Mystery), as Ripley is assailed with some truly creepy “I Know What You Did”s that he can only but guess as to the exact Hows and Whos and Whys.  Sure, book 4 referenced Dickie Greenleaf, but Tom’s character didn’t really care and thus neither did we, and each book has used Tom’s intuition but, again reactively to respond to a current conversation, the sociopathic proactive lies he’s constantly concocting (for himself, for others) happening more in the background.  Here, we’re finally witnesses to Tom’s nervy joy of sussing out the motivations of those around him and predicting what will happen next as a way to set his own behaviors, along with his own psychoanalysis of his actions when he goes through variations of the responses detailed / shown in each book.

So it’s just paced more like an actual book, I suppose, with something fresh occurring to keep our interest within every few pages instead of Highsmith just typing as she explores Ripley’s mind.  Not every author gets to their best point of writing polish at the end of their career, but as Patricia’s next-to-last book, ‘Ripley Under Water’ fully and effectively gets to display how much Ripley has learned and evolved (or not learned and not evolved) while also giving the author her chance to prove her grand grasp on the gray nature of her subject as well as showing a new and earned peak for her eloquent writing style.