Ripley Made Me Root for a Murderer and I’m Not Okay

A nobody gets handed somebody else’s life

Tom Ripley is broke, drifting, forging signatures on small checks in New York, when a shipping magnate named Herbert Greenleaf mistakes him for a close friend of his son Dickie and offers to pay his way to Italy to convince Dickie to come home. Tom isn’t actually close with Dickie. He’s barely met him. But he says yes anyway, because saying yes to being someone else is the only thing Tom has ever been good at.

Once he’s in Mongibello, lounging around with Dickie and Dickie’s girlfriend Marge in that sun-drenched, money-soaked Italian coastal way, something shifts in Tom that isn’t romantic exactly, though people love to read it that way, and isn’t purely envious either. It’s more like Tom looks at Dickie’s life, the boats and the linen shirts and the total lack of consequence, and thinks: that should be mine. Not “I want that.” Mine.

I won’t spoil what happens on the boat, because even if you’ve seen the Minghella film or the Ripley miniseries, the way Highsmith writes it on the page hits different. It’s not a shocking twist. It’s almost administrative. That’s the horror of it.

The thing Highsmith does that almost nobody else can pull off

Here’s the thing. This book works entirely because of point of view. We are locked inside Tom’s head for the whole novel, and Highsmith never lets us out to get a normal person’s reaction shot. There’s no detective character quietly narrating “something is off about this guy.” There’s just Tom, rationalizing, adjusting, feeling a flicker of guilt and then filing it away like paperwork. I found myself, more than once, thinking “okay but he DOES have a point” about something monstrous, and then catching myself and going what is wrong with me.

That’s not a flaw. That’s the whole engine of the book. Highsmith wanted you inside the con, not watching it from a safe distance, and she built a prose style so flat and controlled that it never tips its hand. No purple menace. No ominous music cues in the sentences. Just a guy, thinking, adjusting, thinking some more.

Now the criticism, because this book isn’t flawless and I refuse to pretend it is. The pacing in the middle section, once Tom starts juggling two identities and has to keep forging Dickie’s signature and intercepting mail, drags in a way that feels less like tension and more like bookkeeping. I remember putting it down for two days around the Rome section, not because I was scared or disturbed, just mildly bored watching Tom manage logistics. Highsmith is so committed to the mundane texture of the con that she occasionally forgets to make the mundane interesting. A few readers I’ve talked to bounced off the book entirely right there, and I get it.

Also, and this is the part that ages the book a little: the way Highsmith handles Marge, the girlfriend, treats her almost entirely as an obstacle and a nuisance, filtered through Tom’s contempt for women in general. It’s intentional, it’s Tom’s voice not Highsmith’s endorsement, but it can read as thin on the page in a way that a modern psychological thriller would probably round out more.

What never fails, though, is the ending. I won’t describe it beyond saying it’s not a punishment and it’s not a triumph either, it’s something colder than both, and it’s the reason this book still gets talked about seventy years later instead of being a curiosity from the Eisenhower era.

I picked this up expecting an airport thriller with a fancy Italian backdrop, honestly, because that’s how it gets marketed sometimes. What I got was closer to a character study of ambition with all the guardrails removed. I’m still not sure if that makes it a better book or just a stranger one. Maybe both.

You can grab a copy here if you want to see for yourself: The Talented Mr. Ripley on Amazon.

Tom Ripley doesn’t want to be someone else. He wants to stop being himself, and anyone else’s life will do.

About Patricia Highsmith

Patricia Highsmith was, by nearly every account, not a particularly nice person, and she seemed almost proud of it. She kept snails as pets, drank more than was probably wise, and wrote some of the coldest, most clinically observed psychological fiction of the twentieth century, including Strangers on a Train, which Hitchcock turned into a film before Ripley even existed. She lived much of her adult life in Europe, partly self-exiled from an America she found suffocating, and she wrote morally slippery characters with a kind of detached fascination rather than judgment. You get the sense reading her that she didn’t think people were good, she just thought some of them were better at hiding it, and Tom Ripley was her answer to the question of what happens if you stop hiding it from yourself entirely.

If Ripley got under your skin, read these next

• Strangers on a Train by Patricia Highsmith, for the same icy logic applied to two strangers and one terrible bargain
• The Secret History by Donna Tartt, for beautiful people, a death, and a narrator who helps you understand exactly how it felt reasonable at the time
• Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier, for obsession with someone else’s life dressed up as a gothic romance
• A Simple Favor by Darcey Bell, if you want the modern, trashier descendant of the same con-artist-you-can’t-help-liking formula

For your book club

1. At what exact moment did you stop wanting Tom to get caught, if you ever did?
2. Does Highsmith’s flat, unemotional prose style make Tom scarier or more sympathetic, and can it be both at once?
3. Is this a book about class and envy, about identity, or about something else entirely?
4. How does the ending change your read on everything that came before it?
5. Would this story work at all if it were written from Dickie’s or Marge’s point of view instead of Tom’s?