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The Barnes & Noble Review - Leonard Cassuto

Eugene O'Neill believed that the true artist is not at home in the world. If the more estranged you are, the greater the artist, then Patricia Highsmith would rank higher than Shakespeare. Instead, Highsmith was superb but limited creator of crime fiction. Her best work is quirky, edgy, and deeply insightful into the secret places of desire -- and of hatred, which dwells in the same precincts. Highsmith's friends, lovers, and acquaintances remember her as a difficult and often unpleasant person who lived an angry, solitary life. In Joan Schenkar, Highsmith has found a biographer who does meaningful justice to both her powerful work and her uncomfortable existence.

Highsmith was a terrifically prolific writer, a fountainhead of ideas. Her best books -- like The Talented Mr. Ripley, the 1955 classic of a man who murders without guilt, a novel that spawned four sequels (and which gives Schenkar's biography its name) -- rank among the best writing ever produced by the crime genre. Highsmith's 1950 debut novel, Strangers on a Train, bears only passing resemblance to Hitchcock's 1951 movie adaptation in its memorable rendering of two men wracked and destroyed by their own conflicted longings for death and each other. That book heads a long stream of stories of desire and cruelty that winds through great books like This Sweet Sickness (whose main character does not work at his sanity, as Schenkar observes Highsmith did) and Edith's Diary (1977), another tale of the seductive power of fantasy. Almost everything that Highsmith published is worth reading.

But Highsmith never evolved over the course of a 50-year career. Instead, she repeatedly plumbed the same dark well, bringing up at the end of her barbed hooks slippery, wriggling, strange, and yet painfully familiar stories. Highsmith's lack of evolution has prompted Schenkar to write an inventive kind of biography. Instead of walking chronologically through Highsmith's life and work, Schenkar has devised a new biographical form that evokes the mind of its subject, a writer whose creativity -- and whose life itself -- gained its shape through grinding, deepening repetition. Schenkar organizes The Talented Miss Highsmith around Highsmith's obsessions: forgery, impersonation, status seeking, and homosexuality (with the anxiety it brought), to name a few. The Talented Miss Highsmith thus starts in the middle of Highsmith's story, moving now forward, now back, and then forward again, like a mind whirling on a wheel. (The book reads completely coherently in its pendulum-like movements, but just in case, Schenkar places an annotated chronology, "Just the Facts," in the back. You won't need it.)

The unusual end result is a triumph of the biographer's art. Schenkar has immersed herself deeply in Highsmith's voluminous Swiss archives, and as deeply in the scenes that Highsmith moved through: New York in the '40s and '50s, and then Europe, after Highsmith expatriated herself in midlife. Moreover, Schenkar gets to know Highsmith well enough to tell when she was lying, a skill absolutely critical when dealing with a writer who, aware that her archives would be pored over, lied carefully and often to her future biographers. Schenkar cannily detects lies by omission also. For instance, she rightly points to the importance of the many years that Highsmith wrote for comic books at the start of her career. These years served as a kind of low-caste apprenticeship for the young writer, but it was an apprenticeship that Highsmith (who was otherwise a meticulous record keeper) expunged almost entirely from the documentation of her life. Schenkar recovers it, to revelatory effect.

Such erasures typify Highsmith's creative approach to life and art. The Talented Miss Highsmith is cross-referenced (for example, one chapter will refer the reader to an earlier or later one) in the same way that Highsmith's life and art are cross-referenced: Schenkar makes the macabre discovery that the murders in Highsmith's books often take place at addresses that Highsmith lived at herself, or where her friends resided.

Highsmith's fictions flow to and from her life in this way, and the novelist deliberately entangled them. A chance meeting with a woman customer in a New York department store where Highsmith was working as a clerk resulted, for example, in the groundbreaking The Price of Salt (1952), one of the bravest and most honest fictions of homosexuality of the American 1950s, when Red baiting and homophobia nourished each other and the gay community lived in peril. The novel is now a landmark of gay literature. But the same chance encounter also provoked Highsmith to steal the address of that woman she briefly waited on, travel to New Jersey to spy on her, and then fantasize about murdering her -- for to Highsmith, "Murder is a kind of making love, a kind of possessing." Highsmith had lots of lovers, and while she confined her murders to her fiction, it should not be surprising that she never succeeded in forging a long-term partnership.

In mapping what she calls "Highsmith country," Schenkar reveals a blighted and bloody land with an "impossibly sore center," empty of most forms of human kindness and fraught with the conflicts that arose from Highsmith's unending quarrels with the world and its people. Schenkar doesn't psychoanalyze, but she does psychologize -- as biographers usually do. And she discovers in Patricia Highsmith a personality so involuted that that the novelist's times get sucked into her mind in such a way that political causes (such as Palestinian liberation) are relentlessly forced into the service of her own obsessions.

In Highsmith country "everyone -- including the author -- is a forger," and no one may ever be trusted. Highsmith's relations with her mother, a classic love-hate struggle marked by numerous rapier-like letters thrust back and forth over the years, exemplified the rest of her social life in this respect. Highsmith struggled for years to maintain relations with her mother, her dearest friend and closest enemy, and then she cut her mother out of her life. So, too, with everyone else, from whom she withdrew further and further as she aged; and so, too, with the larger world, from which she retreated into vicious prejudice, starting with a vituperative and always inconsistent anti-Semitism. "I lack sympathy," Highsmith once wrote. She certainly did.

But Schenkar has sympathy even if Highsmith doesn't, and she shows it through her eloquent understanding of her subject. How beautifully this book is written! Schenkar, a playwright as well as a biographer, has a great ear, and her prose sparkles with original imagery, as when she observes at the outset that Highsmith is "as American as rattlesnake venom." Such gems glitter throughout this biography.

The Talented Miss Highsmith is a definitive portrait of a writer who was, Schenkar notes, not just an outsider artist but an "outsider everything." Schenkar gives a fascinating and enriching tour of the world in which Patricia Highsmith lived, especially the dark, dessicated, and lonely hallways of her mind, creepy corridors in which her works grew, one after another. This biography takes us to these dangerous places in innovative and stirring style. It's a hell of a book -- and vice versa. --Leonard Cassuto

Leonard Cassuto is a professor of English at Fordham University and the author of Hard-Boiled Sentimentality: The Secret History of American Crime Stories, now available from Columbia University Press. He can be found on the web at www.lcassuto.com.

The New York Times Book Review - Jeanette Winterson

Schenkar has a wonderfully bold approach: not worrying about a linear chronology (although this is meticulously supplied in the appendices), but choosing instead to follow the emotional water course of Highsmith's life, allowing her subject to find her own level—to be tidal, sullen, to flow without check, so that events in one decade naturally make an imaginative tributary into turbulence before and after. Schenkar's writing is witty, sharp and light-handed…This is a biography of clarity and style. A model of its kind.

The New York Times - Janet Maslin

This is no ordinary literary biography. Ms. Schenkar, also a playwright, is not one of those thorough, respectful scholars who let the facts and the literature speak for themselves. Hers is an unusually assertive voice, which makes it well suited to Highsmith…Her approach is innovative…And her sensibility is sufficiently ghoulish to keep her undaunted by what she calls Highsmith's "hundreds of raspingly acute portraits of quietly transgressive acts," which is a relatively mild way of characterizing the shock value of Highsmith's tirelessly misanthropic work.

Publishers Weekly

Author and playwright Schenkar (Truly Wilde) presents a compelling portrait of suspense novelist Patricia Highsmith (1921–1995), whose own life was often as twisted as that of her antihero Tom Ripley. Dispensing with the traditional chronological narrative, Schenkar divides her study into themed sections, which crisscross and mirror each other, embodying the themes of doubling and alter egos in Highsmith's work and life. From her early years in Texas through her time soaking up Manhattan's literary life in the '40s to her self-exile in Europe, Highsmith kept diaries in which she meticulously detailed everything from her myriad female lovers to plot ideas. Pessimistic, alcoholic and chronically unhappy, Highsmith created some of the most chilling tales of psychological suspense and betrayal, including The Talented Mr. Ripley and its sequels, and Strangers on a Train. Schenkar's research is impeccable, and she makes excellent use of the voluminous Highsmith archives in Switzerland and interviews with Highsmith's friends, ex-lovers and literary contemporaries. “Perversion,” Highsmith once said, “interests me most and is my guiding darkness,” and Schenkar illuminates how her demons played out on the page and in real life. 16 pages of b&w photos. (Dec.)

Library Journal

Playwright Schenkar (Truly Wilde: The Unsettling Story of Dolly Wilde, Oscar's Unusual Niece) has written a meticulous and careful biography of one of 20th-century America's great crime and mystery writers, the author of Strangers on a Train and The Talented Mr. Ripley. Patricia Highsmith's emotional life was complex and difficult; her lifelong obsession with her relationship to her mother and her homosexuality set the parameters for her travels, friends, lovers, and work. Growing up in Fort Worth, TX, and New York City, Highsmith finally settled in Switzerland. Schenkar, using Highsmith's diaries, notebooks, and writings, tells of her alcoholism, paranoia, depressions, desires, and needs; she is especially good at describing Highsmith's years as a comic book writer and the homosexual culture of the 1940s–50s. Schenkar works through the books, highlighting Highsmith's themes of murder, forgery, identity, doubling, shame, and death while noting the difference between the author's early and best work and her later, inferior writings. VERDICT An imaginative, definitive Highsmith biography, great for literature students, Highsmith fans, and mystery readers.—Gene Shaw, Paramus P.L., NJ

Kirkus Reviews

Exhaustive study of the much-loathed suspense writer best known for the Ripley novels and Strangers on a Train. Patricia Highsmith (1921-1995) generated distaste in many contemporaries for a variety of reasons, including her alcoholism, racism, anti-Semitism and her tendency to give friendship tokens then demand them back. As playwright and biographer Schenkar writes, she was mean, cruel and sexually rapacious with women and a few men. The author traces Highsmith's corrosive behavior to her supreme hatred of her stepfather, whom her mother promised to divorce, then reneged on. Along the way, she damaged most of her relationships, facts well documented in dozens of journals, diaries, short-story collections, massive correspondence and endless lists now housed in the Swiss Literary Archives in Berne, which Schenkar had access to. Born in Fort Worth, Texas, Highsmith's family relocated to New York, where she graduated from Barnard, began reading Dostoyevsky and started submitting manuscripts to the New Yorker, which continually rejected them. She then spent eight years writing plot arcs for Timely Comics before penning Strangers in 1950, which was filmed by Alfred Hitchcock a year later. She used a pseudonym, Claire Morgan, for her second book, The Price of Salt (1952), a lesbian romance that became an underground hit. In 1955, Highsmith published the first of the five books featuring the criminal hero Tom Ripley. Holding to an eight-page-per-day writing schedule, which she maintained for most of her life, Highsmith incorporated her obsessions into her work. She kept 300 snails, for instance, because she liked to watch them copulate, and they show up in Deep Water (1957). Her snobbishness,homosexual undercurrent and love/hate relationship with America are omnipresent. Schenkar makes the case that Highsmith was most comfortable when she was herself uncomfortable, living in cold, dark houses throughout Europe where she never mastered the native languages, or was virulently alienating lovers, editors and most particularly her mother. She died alone, by choice, in Switzerland in 1995. A comprehensive, nuanced evaluation of Highsmith Country. Agent: Russell Galen/Scovil Chichak Galen Literary Agency

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