2 out of 5

Jesus fucking god damn snoozing CHRISTMAS.

Hi ya’ll, my name’s Patricia Highsmith and I just love my creation Tom Ripley.  He’s become so real to me that I just want to explore him as a human being, nevermind all the nefarious sociopathic leanings I tip-toed into the series initially – now (oh boy this’ll be fun) I’ma put Tom into situations where – snort – you think he’s going to pull a Ripley, but instead of doing the expected – or instead of subverting things by having the narrator address the expectations – instead NOTHING will happen except for the book to proceed completely normally… like Ripley could be any character!  Isn’t that great?  Isn’t that why you’re reading the series?  No need to answer.

I’m going to apply some high-level assumptive work here, not backed up by any reading.  Highsmith was born in the early 20s, her first Ripley book coming out in ’55, when she would’ve been in her mid 30s.  I have mixed feelings about the original book, but I accept it as sketching out this original type of character, the sympathetic unsympathetic Tom, whose need for identity bounced between fascinating studies of obsession and self-definition and a distracted travelogue that, I suppose, was meant to highlight the separation of Tom’s thinking and functioning sides.  In one’s 30s (myself having recently rounded the corner), there’s enough history to have somewhat set opinions and to finally begin looking ‘back’ at youth with acceptance that some things do require time to gestate, no matter how much you can intellectualize them when you’re in your teens or 20s.  Much better and more confident was the second Ripley book in 1970.  15 years have passed for Highsmith, and her biography reads a bit bitterly.  Assurance in her own sardonic views might’ve informed this sequel’s more risk-taking (in my eyes) stance on the parallels of good and evil in her character’s life.  I have not yet read the third book from ’74, but the relatively quick turnaround there plus some mentions of the plot in this book, the fourth one, and details from the Wiki summary, suggest that Highsmith had decided to flip-flop her series into something a bit more action-oriented and add to the Ripley palette by extending his ‘skills’ to directly assist another dubious character.  6 years pass.  Highsmith is almost 60.  And perhaps she’s softened on Ripley.  Perhaps her understanding of moral ambiguity is still leashed to a decade ago.  But he writing feels tired, and not at all challenging in ‘Followed.’  There is no longer any grey area for Tom.  He ‘loves’ his wife in a way that’s been established, he’s accepted his past.  And it’s not a ‘warped notion of gender’  – to paraphrase the back cover of this ’93 Vintage Crime edition I’ve read – to stick Ripley in a dress and have him hang out in a gay bar.  Tom is by now comfortable enough to pull this off without hesitation, and it’s blended in to the plot as a moderately necessary distraction to achieve a goal, so the reader doesn’t really have to ponder it too much either.  There is no danger here.  Tom is the good guy.  There’s nothing inherently wrong with that, but besides Tom’s past being what draws ‘the boy who follows’ to admire him, there’s not much else to tie this to the Ripley world.  At moments Highsmith will touch the surface of rich themes – how a life of deception has bred this man capable of accepting with ease the actions of others regardless of whether its murder, or kidnapping, or thieving, but its presented with that same vacation-y tone of the first book that I just found fucking boring as shit.  Highsmith is a skilled wordsmith for sure, and I never felt outside of Tom’s ‘voice’, so he is / was a fully realized persona, but it’s as though she had nothing directly left to say and so just tossed an idea into the pot and let Tom speak for near 300 pages.

The book begins and ends with carpenter ants pestering Ripley with their incessant gnawing upon his cabinetry.  This is a fun wraparound symbol to ponder, and hints at how this story could’ve looked / felt richer when outlined.  Tom is happy in Paris with wife Heloise.  A 16-year old American begins to follow Tom around, and soon we learn that he – Frank – has run away from his rich family in the States after his father’s death.  Highsmith drops hints that kidnappers might be hunting for Frank in hopes of holding him for high ransom, and Tom easily steps into a father figure role, which works for Frank, since he seems to idolize the concept he’s pieced together of Tom (not entirely innaccurate, it seems)  based on reading in newspapers about some of the events we got to experience in book 1 and 2.  This is the first 50 or so pages of the book, and frankly, it was wonderful.  It drove forth with that same confidence I enjoyed from ‘Ripley Under Ground’ and of course the giddy potential of Ripley as a father figure promised compelling complications.  Alas, we don’t really like Frank.  He’s a pretty realistic representation of a whiny teenager, and though an after-the-fact reflection upon the tale shows Tom perhaps trying to guide Frank to bypass all the self-doubts that slowed his own ‘progress’ in life – during the reading, we don’t get the impression that Tom really likes Frank either.  Tom’s just a nice guy, and this is a project.  So for 200 pages, Frank whines, Tom takes him on a tour, at one point he wears a dress, and everything is exactly what it seems.

This is a great concept, but it’s executed too calmly and too realistically.  Three cheers for subtlety, but give me some narrative meat on which to chew while I’m reading the damn thing.  Even though I live in a present day where I’m aware that there are five books in this series, I read books 1 and 2 not knowing how Tom would get out of his situation.  With ‘The Boy Who Followed Ripley,’ I never even had to doubt that he would return to status quo.

Meh.