Since his debut in 1955, Tom Ripley has evolved into the ultimate bad boy sociopath, influencing countless novelists and filmmakers. In this first novel, we are introduced to suave, handsome Tom Ripley: a young striver, newly arrived in the heady world of Manhattan in the 1950s. A product of a broken home, branded a "sissy" by his dismissive Aunt Dottie, Ripley becomes enamored of the moneyed world of his new friend, Dickie Greenleaf. This fondness turns obsessive when Ripley is sent to Italy to bring back his libertine pal but grows enraged by Dickie's ambivalent feelings for Marge, a charming American dilettante. A dark reworking of Henry James's The Ambassadors, The Talented Mr. Ripley-immortalized in the 1998 film starring Matt Damon, Jude Law, and Gywneth Paltrow-is an unforgettable introduction to this debonair confidence man, whose talent for self-invention and calculated murder is chronicled in four subsequent novels.
Industry Reviews
"In the same way that Vince Gilligan made Breaking Bad's Walter White an awful person that I took a guilty pleasure in rooting for, Highsmith made the detestable Tom Ripley an intriguing character that I hoped would get away with his crimes." -- Mark Frauenfelder - BoingBoing
"The brilliance of Highsmith's conception of Tom Ripley was her ability to keep the heroic and demonic American dreamer in balance in the same protagonist-thus keeping us on his side well after his behavior becomes far more sociopathic than that of a con man like Gatsby." -- Frank Rich - New York Times Magazine
"[Highsmith] has created a world of her own-a world claustrophobic and irrational which we enter each time with a sense of personal danger." -- Graham Greene
"Mesmerizing...a Ripley novel is not to be safely recommended to the weak-minded or impressionable." -- Washington Post
"The most sinister and strangely alluring quintet the crime-fiction genre has ever produced." -- Mark Harris - Entertainment Weekly
"Highsmith's subversive touch is in making the reader complicit with Ripley's cold logic." -- Daily Telegraph (UK)
"[Highsmith] forces us to re-evaluate the lines between reason and madness, normal and abnormal, while goading us into sharing her treacherous hero's point of view." -- Michiko Kakutani - New York Times
"[Tom Ripley] is as appalling a protagonist as any mystery writer has ever created." -- Newsday
"Savage in the way of Rabelais or Swift." -- Joyce Carol Oates - New York Review of Books
"For eliciting the menace that lurks in familiar surroundings, there's no one like Patricia Highsmith." -- Time
"Murder, in Patricia Highsmith's hands, is made to occur almost as casually as the bumping of a fender or a bout of food poisoning. This downplaying of the dramatic... has been much praised, as has the ordinariness of the details with which she depicts the daily lives and mental processes of her psychopaths. Both undoubtedly contribute to the domestication of crime in her fiction, thereby implicating the reader further in the sordid fantasy that is being worked out." -- Robert Towers - New York Review of Books
