Why did I love this book?
Highsmith’s detached, keenly observant prose is the perfect vehicle to explore a complicated man like Tom Ripley. Ripley stands in the shadows just outside the sun-drenched world of Dickie Greenleaf, the son of a wealthy industrialist, and wants in. What begins as fascination with Dickie’s lavish and carefree lifestyle turns into murderous obsession. Through cracks in Highsmith’s beautifully controlled prose, Ripley implicates us. We are invited into his vulnerabilities, his anxiety about his social position, and his desire to live well. We appreciate his artistic sensitivities, his cleverness. Soon this carefully constructed charisma falls away to reveal a cool, remorseless rage. But it’s too late, we’ve already been seduced.
24 authors picked The Talented Mr. Ripley as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.
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"…