I have had languishing on my bookshelf for some time Found In The Street, a late Patricia Highsmith novel. The perception, of course, is that early Highsmith represents her strongest work, while her later stuff is derivative, at best. At loose ends over the holiday, I pulled it down and was quite surprised. I am a huge fan of her five "Ripley" novels, but this one more than holds its reader's attention.
Highsmith is described as a mystery writer, or at least that is how Heather Reisman would have her shelved at Chapters. In fact, there is no mystery to unravel here, no "whodunit?" quality. There is only one murder over these 277 pages, and that casual act of violence is only pieced together after the fact. Instead, Highsmith is concerned with the darker elements of the human condition. She questions how we get how we have become, and her prose marvels at the great diversity of humanity.
The protagonist of the novel is Jack Sutherland, born of a well-to-do family but shiftless, for the most part. Having run into a little trouble with drugs on a trip to Europe, he has spent the ensuing years trying to redeem himself in the eyes of his family; Jack is, himself, a fine father to his young daughter Amelia. After toying with journalism in New York, he begins to get some traction as an illustrator. What is unconventional in this story of respectability sought is Jack's marriage to Natalia, a fellow blueblood who splits her time between their apartment in Greenwich Village and her parents' home in Pennsylvania. Natalia has made it clear that she must stay unfettered, child or no child, and she drifts in and out, spending time with her friends. Her "soul mate" is Louis, a gay man of whom Jack seems quite jealous. But this irritation is displaced by the Sutherlands' new fixation, Elsie Tyler.
Ms Tyler is discovered by Jack in a local diner, talking with the neighborhood eccentric who found Jack's wallet and returned it without pilfering the hundreds of dollars it contained. Ralph Linderman is Jack's foil, a man whose paternalism masks a dangerous obsession with Elsie. As she is drawn into the Sutherlands' circle, Linderman assumes that Jack has coerced her into an affair. In fact, Elsie begins sleeping with Natalia, demonstrating that human relationships are far more complex than the puritanically judgmental Linderman can even imagine. And, interestingly, Jack is not at all jealous of either his wife or her lover, both of whom define his erotic longings. These disconnects, the discomfort the action hides, is the most intriguing part of the novel for me.
Highsmith describes in great detail the four or five streets in the Village where the novel is set. But her New York could be New York of the 1950s as easily as it might be the 1980s in which this action is supposed to take place. There are but awkward references to video cassettes and new wave music, and -- of course -- Linderman finds enough money to take Tom Ripley to Europe. So, it is as if Highsmith's narration, displaced from the 1950s, argues uneasily for a progressive tolerance of the Sutherlands and their friends that reflects her experience as an expatriated lesbian while Linderman, a figure who too seems to walk out of an earlier time in American history, cannot fathom at all the social realities of the contemporary United States.
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