Spoiler Alert: This post discusses the ending of The Talented Mr. Ripley.
Some way into The Talented Mr. Ripley, Tom is alone in Dickie Greenleaf's house in Mongibello, a village on the Italian coast. He takes Dickie's clothes from the wardrobe and puts them on. Then he stands at the mirror and practises being Dickie, in Dickie's voice, telling Marge that it is over between them. Dickie comes in and finds him.
Highsmith writes the scene from inside Tom, in the third person, and the sentences report his pleasure and then his humiliation in one level voice. Nothing in the prose marks the moment as a warning. A man has just rehearsed another man's life in borrowed clothes, a few chapters before he kills that man with an oar, and the book leaves it to the reader to see what has happened.
That level voice is Highsmith's discovery, and it is harder to achieve than it looks. The Talented Mr. Ripley, published in 1955, is told in a close third person locked to one man. The reader learns nothing Tom does not know, sees nobody Tom is not looking at, and is given his calculations, his panics, his small vanities and his pleasure in good things with the same steady attention. What the reader is never given is a judgement. There is no narrator who steps back to say what these thoughts amount to, and no second consciousness in the book to weigh them.
Consider the choices a novelist has when the central character is a murderer. The first is the confession. Poe's killers address the reader directly and insist on their sanity, and the insisting is the story: a murderer in the first person is always talking to someone, and the form assumes a listener who will judge. The second is a wider third person, with a narrator free to move away from the killer and comment on him. The third is the arrangement Dostoevsky made in Crime and Punishment, which stays close to Raskolnikov for most of its length and is soaked in his conscience: the fever, the dreams, the compulsion to give himself away, the confession and the epilogue in Siberia. Dostoevsky's close third person is a machine for bringing a man's conscience up to the level of his crime.
Highsmith kept Dostoevsky's closeness and removed the conscience. Tom feels fear, envy, irritation, self-pity and a great deal of pleasure. He worries constantly about being caught. Nothing in him works the way remorse works in Raskolnikov, and the prose does not supply what he lacks. The close third person came to her with a long history of moral seriousness behind it. Henry James built his late novels on a single consciousness that carries the whole book, Strether in The Ambassadors being the purest example, and most of James's centres of consciousness are scrupulous people, more troubled by their own motives than by anyone else's. Highsmith took the same instrument and pointed it at a man without scruples.
The result is a discovery about suspense. Suspense follows point of view. A reader kept inside one head for long enough begins to want what that head wants, and the mechanism does not check the head's credentials first. Every near miss in the second half of the novel, with Marge, with the Italian police, with Dickie's father and the American detective he brings to Europe, raises the reader's pulse on Tom's behalf. A reader who would be appalled by Tom across a dinner table finds, when the police officer in Rome seems about to notice something, that they want him to fail to notice it. Highsmith put a murderer at the centre of the oldest machine in popular fiction and let it run.
Marge is the test case. She distrusts Tom almost from the beginning, and her instinct about him is sound. Highsmith gives her intelligence and a sharp tongue, and none of it reaches the reader directly, because Marge exists in the book only as Tom sees her. Her suspicion arrives as one more thing he finds tiresome, her letters as documents he reads for danger. A different novel would let the reader stand beside Marge for a chapter. This one never does, and by the time she comes close to the truth the reader has been irritated by her, in Tom's company, for most of a novel.
Then there is the ending. Tom is not caught. A forged will leaves him Dickie's income, Dickie's father accepts it, and the book closes with Tom arriving by ship in Greece, where four policemen are standing on the dock. He walks towards them, ready for it, and they pay him no attention. He wonders whether he will see policemen waiting for him at every pier he ever comes to, decides there is no use thinking about it, and asks the taxi driver for the best hotel in town. The genre's oldest promise, that the last chapter will deliver the criminal to justice, is simply not kept. The fear stays with Tom. The punishment never comes.
Highsmith wrote four more Ripley novels over the next thirty-six years, and the third, Ripley's Game (1974), shows the method from the outside. Tom, slighted at a party by a picture framer called Jonathan Trevanny, who is ill and short of money, puts Jonathan's name forward to an acquaintance looking for someone to commit a murder. Much of the book then follows Jonathan instead of Tom. Jonathan has the conscience Tom lacks, and the reader watches a decent man talk himself into killing, one anxious sentence at a time. Set beside those chapters, Tom's sections read even more coolly than they did in the first book. Highsmith had found the one way to make her method visible, which was to put an ordinary conscience next to it.
The arrangement remains rare, and I think for two reasons. The first is commercial. A thriller with a criminal at its centre now tends towards the first person, where the attraction is a voice: a narrator who is clever, or funny, or wounded, and whose company is the pleasure of the book. Highsmith's Tom performs for everyone in the novel except the reader. Her prose lends him no wit and no glamour, and it asks the reader to stay with him anyway.
The second reason is technical. Writing in Highsmith's manner means never adding the sentence that tells the reader the writer knows better. That sentence is always available, it is short, and it feels like a kindness. I know the temptation from my own drafts. There is usually a line somewhere in a chapter whose only job is to let the reader know that I disapprove of what my narrator has just done, and a good part of revising is finding that line and cutting it. Highsmith seems to have cut hers before she wrote them.
Some readers find the Ripley books unpleasant, and they are right about the experience. The unpleasantness is part of the design. A reader who has caught themselves hoping Tom gets away with it has learned something about how sympathy is produced in fiction, and something about themselves, and the book declines to say which lesson matters more.
The mirror scene in Mongibello holds the whole method in small. A man in another man's clothes rehearses another man's voice, the owner walks in, and the prose records the embarrassment with the same composure it will later bring to the oar, the ashtray and the forged will. Highsmith never raises her voice. The reader raises it for her, and notices only afterwards whose side they were on while doing it.