The Talented Mr. Ripley

Patricia Highsmith

4 ideas

1. Ripley kills Dickie and becomes him

   Tom Ripley, a small-time New York con man, is paid by shipbuilder Herbert Greenleaf to go to Mongibello, Italy and persuade his son Dickie to come home; instead Tom grows obsessed with Dickie's life, and when Dickie cools toward him Tom bludgeons him with an oar in a boat off San Remo and sinks the body. He then lives as Dickie in Rome, forging his signature and letters, kills Dickie's friend Freddie Miles when Freddie gets close to the truth, and finally switches back to himself and stages Dickie's apparent suicide. He ends the novel free in Greece with Dickie's money, inherited through a forged will, and haunted only by an imagined fear of police.

2. Identity is performance that others ratify

   Tom succeeds as Dickie because identity is held together by surface signals: clothes, handwriting, rings, mannerisms, bank signatures, and the expectations of people who have little reason to look closely. Strangers and institutions confirm whoever shows the right markers, so a skilled mimic with no fixed self can occupy another person's social existence more convincingly than a weak original.

3. Suspense that turns readers into accomplices

   The story is told close inside Tom's point of view, so each near-exposure is felt as his danger rather than as the approach of justice. The reader ends up tracking his risks, sharing his relief at every narrow escape, and hoping he gets away, which shows how narrative perspective alone can move moral sympathy toward a murderer.

4. Wealth and class shield the plausible impostor

   Tom's crimes go undetected partly because moneyed, mobile expatriate society runs on trust in manners, letters of credit, and assumed respectability, and because the police defer to people who seem well-off. Envy of an effortless upper-class life drives the murder, and possessing that life's outward trappings then protects the murderer from scrutiny.

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