Twisted psychology and dark humor in The Talented Mr. Ripley and Fight Club. By Kevin Rush.

If you’ve ever gotten into a roommate situation you’ve regretted, you can probably appreciate this week’s two books. In each, a new acquaintance appears mysteriously, moves in and creates mayhem. Sure, there are plenty of bad iterations of this basic plot—I’m looking at you, Single White Female—but our featured authors masterfully elevate their tales with haunting portrayals of human psychology at the breaking point.

Patricia Highsmith, whom we’ve discussed before, began her writing career authoring “real life” comic books, but gained prominence after her modestly successful first novel, Strangers on a Train, (1950) caught the attention of Alfred Hitchcock, who quickly turned it into a solid thriller in 1951. In Strangers, Highsmith gave readers a glimpse into the mind of a creepy sociopath with ambiguous sexuality. Highsmith penned The Talented Mr. Ripley in 1955, again portraying a homicidal sociopath, but this time making his homosexuality more overt and audaciously placing him in the center of an antihero drama as the protagonist.

French filmmaker René Clément was first to bring Ripley to the screen as Plein Soleil in 1960, starring 25-year-old Alain Delon, who went on to have a very good career. It was also the screen debut of 20-year-old singer-actress Marie Laforêt, who later scored pop hits in France covering Bob Dylan’s Blowin’ in the Wind and The Rolling Stones’ Paint it Black. Although the title means Broad Daylight, an apt descriptor for a brazen murder in the sunny Mediterranean, the film was released in America as Purple Noon.

Director Clément made several choices that turned what might have been a great film into only a serviceable crime drama. First, he cast French actors to play Americans, so the feeling of ex-pats in voluntary exile was lost. Clément also took many liberties with the plot; the story concludes with a nifty twist that is nevertheless 180 degrees from where Highsmith’s book ends. Clément does direct Delon’s portrayal of Tom Ripley to be enigmatic and self-involved, but in choosing to drop Tom’s homosexuality in favor of a heterosexual love triangle, he dilutes much of Tom’s motivation for his crimes.

American audiences are more familiar with Anthony Minghella’s 1999 version, The Talented Mr. Ripley, with Matt Damon in the title role. The strong cast also included Jude Law, Gwyneth Paltrow, Cate Blanchett, and Philip Seymour Hoffman. More faithful to Highsmith’s novel, the film was moderately successful, but did not generate sufficient excitement for a Damon-as-Ripley franchise. Still, of Highsmith’s four subsequent Ripley books, two have garnered film adaptations and, at this writing, a Ripley TV series is in preproduction.

Ripley was a daring novel in its time. Despite a wealth of mainstream homosexual writers and a gay literary subculture featuring prominent homosexual characters, overt homosexuality was still very much taboo in mainstream fiction. Gore Vidal’s third novel, The City and the Pillar caused something of a scandal in 1948, by presenting a loving homosexual relationship as natural. In that respect, Ripley represents a step backward; homosexuality is again taboo. But Tom Ripley is the central figure, and Highsmith invites us to root for him, in spite his crimes.

Yet, in a post-Stonewall, post-Angels-in-America, post-Obergefell world, is Mr. Ripley still relevant? If this were an age where reasonable minds were allowed to disagree, readers could debate the validity of the implied nexus of homosexuality, narcissism, and sociopathy manifest in Tom Ripley. Today, surely, there will be voices in the Wokeratti calling Highsmith’s novel a dangerous slur and demanding that Ripley be cancelled. On the other hand, readers willing to accept Tom Ripley as Highsmith’s attempt at a unique, multilayered character, rather than a blunt, artless stereotype, are in for a treat.

This is a superbly crafted novel with tension throughout. It is horror on a grotesquely human level, as the author invites you into the mind of a sociopath, and entices you to pull for him. The reader, against his own will, finds himself emotionally invested in Ripley, and hoping for his best possible outcome.

If you’ve seen the 1999 film starring Edward Norton and Brad Pitt, you know I’m breaking the first two rules, but Fight Club, a bitter, shocking and often hilarious satire of maleness unmoored from positive masculinity, cries out for discussion. Directed by David Fincher, the movie got mixed reviews for its combination of tongue-in-cheek philosophizing and brutal violence but has proved popular with viewers. I haven’t seen the film since it first came out, but I remember enjoying it immensely until the ludicrous ending left me totally deflated. Shortly thereafter, many people, including some of my high school students, told me the book was much better. I declined to read it until this summer, specifically for this blog.

If you’ve read this far, you’re probably wondering whether—if you’ve seen the movie and already know who Tyler Durden is—there will be enough left from the bizarre characters and twisty-turny plot to hold your interest.

My answer is an enthusiastic yes. If you like a novel that grabs you by the throat and does not let go until you have feverishly devoured the last page, this book is for you. Stylistically, there’s much to admire in its art and construction: the staccato stream of consciousness, the jittery neurosis that pulses in every line, and layer upon layer of complications building like an anxiety dream you cannot awaken from. All these elements lead me to conclude that if Joseph Heller and Jack Kerouac had had a lovechild that they whipped with an electrical cord, he’d have grown up to be Chuck Palahniuk. But Fight Club is also a very timely novel that taps into millennial dysfunction. If you were disappointed by the movie’s ending, be assured the novel’s conclusion is much more satisfying. Finally, the book is short enough to tackle in a weekend, so there’s really no excuse not to dive in. Just don’t tell anyone where you heard about it. 

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