Ripley Under Water by Patricia Highsmith (1991)

The last in the series about gentleman-of-leisure and occasional killer Tom Ripley, and the second to last novel that Highsmith wrote (arguably the last that she finished, given the first-draft quality of Small g: A Summer Idyll), Ripley Under Water begins as our globetrotting American-in-France is enjoying some time at a cafe when he runs into another ex-pat, David Pritchard. Pritchard and his wife Janice have recently moved into a house near Ripley’s stately home. Unfortunately, David especially seems interested in more than borrowing a cup of sugar from his new neighbour, revealing himself to be hell-bent on exposing Ripley’s life of crime for psychopathic reasons of his own…
 
I wasn’t much looking forward to this last of the Ripliad. The details of its writing and reception didn’t bode well. It was written in the last four or so years of Highsmith’s life and tends to polarise readers, many of whom remark on its perfunctory plot and lack of incident. Moreover, it’s a direct sequel to the second book in the series, Ripley Under Ground, and therefore necessitates regurgitation of that novel’s plot.
 
All of the signs indicated, then, that this would be an example of a late-period novel by a crime writer of declining abilities, a la Agatha Christie and Ruth Rendell. Even the first chapter felt somewhat clumsy in its introduction of the main plot thread, with Ripley thinking about an odd person he’s seen recently, right before bumping into him. The narrative does somewhat bear the hallmarks of a writer of decreasing focus – Tom’s thoughts have a slight tendency to ramble, feeling less like those of a man in his 30s than of, well, a 70-year-old woman, as Highsmith was in the year of this book’s release.
 
However, I was pleasantly surprised to find myself ranged against the naysayers when it comes to Ripley Under Water, as I found it very compulsive reading. This is mostly due to the novel’s (or Ripley’s) antagonists, David and his wife Janice Pritchard, two of the most fascinatingly repulsive and pathological characters that Highsmith ever created. Their very names – the surname rendered repeatedly by French characters as variations on Prick-ard, a pun which the author doesn’t let pass – seem to ooze with the contempt that Highsmith has for them and their type.
 
They represent not just the antithesis of Tom Ripley but the apotheosis of Highsmith’s guttural disgust for a certain American caricature: common, ill-mannered, uncultured, hypocritical, crude and pathetic and ignorant and ragingly envious of anyone they suspect of being better than them. (Which is most people.) Of course, they’re not really the antithesis of Ripley given that he is, after all, a career criminal and serial killer. He doesn’t have the moral high ground. But damn it if he’s not at least a wonderful host, unlike this pair of pricks.
 
David is the dominant partner, a psychotic fantasist whose exploits have also included sending menacing letters to pop stars, while Janice is a cowering shrew who flits between apologising for her husband and enjoying his excesses. He beats her – she’s constantly rubbing at a wrist or an arm where he’s bruised her – but in her own way she’s equally sick, enjoying what he does on a sadomasochistic level. Both she and her husband are the type of sick people who sometimes find each other and make the most compatible marriages that they could hope for. Janice might be a more salvageable personality than him. She’s a hysterical attention-seeker, but has a genuine victimhood about her, remarking that if she left David he’d just turn on her like he did Ripley.
 
David reminded me a touch of the psychopath that Highsmith created for A Dog’s Ransom (1972). But where that guy was a poor New Yorker on disability allowance, his sick and jealous behaviour therefore limited to the pets of penthouse-dwellers, David is the prodigal son of a lumber magnate. He’s able to stalk people across international borders and create havoc in their lives, not even motivated by money.
 
In one scene he calls Ripley a “snob crook”, and although he’s not wrong, you don’t get the sense that he really has any moral feelings about Ripley one way or another. He’d be more than happy to live Ripley’s life and do exactly what he’s done with no qualms whatsoever. His motivation is sadistic jealousy, a desire to torture someone who has the peace and tranquillity that he craves. The harassment he perpetrates would be just as thorough and vicious if Ripley’s secret wasn’t criminal, like homosexuality or a history of mental illness that he doesn’t want the neighbours to find out about.
 
In a way, Ripley Under Water represents a conflict of two distinct types that Highsmith used for her psychopaths: the suave and demonic, and the weird and debased. The gentleman and the pig.
 
I can’t honestly say that Ripley Under Water is as good a novel as any of the others in the series. It’s just not as fully rounded and elegant a piece of craftsmanship, lacking the narrative tension and focus of earlier entries. Its plot is vague and jerky and lacking in set pieces, quite a lot of it revolving around trips to different countries and conversations in which the plot of Ripley Under Ground is recounted.

It helps if you’ve read the second Ripley novel before this one. I may have missed something, but I don’t think that the previous novel in the series, The Boy Who Followed Ripley, is even alluded to here, though all the others are.
 
This suggests that the events of that novel succeed Ripley Under Water, although the timeline of the series tends to be very loose. It takes place roughly over 15 years, yet was written over 36 years. The last couple of novels has a wildly different feel from the original, which was written slap-bang in the middle of the 1950s. Highsmith’s writing style doesn’t change much, but she’s describing a completely different world.
 
In 1955’s The Talented Mr Ripley people still said “queer” to mean gay, wore overcoats and trilbies if they were men, and travelled for several days by boat from America to Italy because air travel wasn’t widespread yet. In Ripley Under Water, meanwhile, air travel is cheap and easy (Tom flits between the Middle East, France, and the UK in what feels like as much story-time as it took him to get from New York to Mongibello in his first adventure), gay definitely means homosexual, and everything just feels more modern, or ‘90s. (Tom debates getting a microwave and watches a film on VHS: hard to come by in what should logically be the early to mid-1970s, or even ‘60s if you’re being super picky.) It’s probably best not to think about the timeline too much, although it’s certainly an amusing illustration of changing social norms.
 
Nonetheless, despite its vague and rambling quality, Ripley Under Water’s not a bad novel at all if you enjoy Highsmith, propelled as it is by some truly bizarre character dynamics.