Average Bufph Rating: 5.0 / 5.0
Patricia Highsmith
2008-05-27
An American classic and the inspiration for the motion picture starring Matt Damon and Gwyneth Paltrow.
It’s here, in the first volume of Patricia Highsmith’s five-book Ripley series, that we are introduced to the suave Tom Ripley, a young striver seeking to leave behind his past as an orphan bullied for being a “sissy.” Newly arrived in the heady world of Manhattan, Ripley meets a wealthy industrialist who hires him to bring his playboy son, Dickie Greenleaf, back from gallivanting in Italy. Soon Ripley’s fascination with Dickie’s debonair lifestyle turns obsessive as he finds himself enraged by Dickie’s ambivalent affections for Marge, a charming American dilettante, and Ripley begins a deadly game. “Sinister and strangely alluring” (Mark Harris, Entertainment Weekly) The Talented Mr. Ripley serves as an unforgettable introduction to this smooth confidence man, whose talent for self-invention is as unnerving—and unnervingly revealing of the American psyche—as ever.
Roth's 'The Talented Mr. Ripley' is a masterful blend of psychological thriller and social satire. Tom Ripley's journey through the high society of post-war Italy is a haunting exploration of ambition, deception, and the darker side of the human psyche. The prose is as sharp as a dagger, each sentence a stroke in the portrait of a man who blurs the line between charm and menace.
