Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | How to Listen
Patricia Highsmith’s 1955 thriller “The Talented Mr. Ripley” follows a young, down-on-his-luck scammer, Tom Ripley, who is looking to reverse his fortunes. When he receives a job offer to go to Italy and retrieve Dickie Greenleaf, a rich socialite on an endless holiday, Tom finds the perfect opportunity to work his way into the upper crust. But as he becomes more and more obsessed with Dickie and Dickie’s life, the breezy getaway turns into something much more sinister, sending them down a dangerous path.
In this week’s episode, the Book Review’s MJ Franklin discusses the book with his colleagues Tina Jordan, Sadie Stein and Sarah Lyall, our thrillers columnist. Caution: Spoilers abound.
They also discuss comments and questions that readers submitted. If you’ve read “The Talented Mr. Ripley” and want to join the conversation, we’d love to hear your reactions in the comments. We’ll get you started:
Sarah Lyall: “I love this book. I read this a long time ago, I don’t really remember when, and as I went back to it, I was struck by the contrast between how I feel now and how I felt then. I think then I was much more interested in the plot, which is potboilery and crazy, and you don’t really expect it. It feels sort of like an adventure story. You can read it that way. I was much more struck in this instance by Highsmith’s artistry in presenting us with this character who does such unsavory things and yet who we root for. She gets so deeply inside his head that we follow along with what he’s doing without a lot of extraneous sort of explanations for it or, you know, efforts to really, really psychoanalyze him the way some writers would introduce this sort of character. I was really struck by her restraint and how carefully this book unfolds.” …
Sadie Stein: “This time around, I was really interested to read the allusions to Henry James’s 1903 novel ‘The Ambassadors,’ because I had, in the time since, read that she deliberately modeled at least a setup on that. And in fact, she mentions it a couple of times. … It’s not very similar, but the premise of the James novel is indeed that a kind of socially precarious, you could say social climber, is given a commission to go to Europe and collect a young scion and bring him back to work in the family business. And then he’s beguiled by Europe and becomes a total aesthete. The difference is he’s a very moral character.”
We would love to hear your thoughts about this episode, and about the Book Review’s podcast in general. You can send them to [email protected].
The post Book Club: Let’s Talk About ‘The Talented Mr. Ripley’ appeared first on New York Times.