Word: ripleyisms
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...suppose you'll be wanting to know what it was really like in Europe in 1957 when, like Tom Ripley as played by Matt Damon, I arrived on the Queen Mary. I was there, of course, trying to find myself or, alternatively, someone who looked even remotely like Gwyneth Paltrow...
...better to be a fake nobody than a real somebody. Contra Tom Ripley, this is the conclusion reached by the two lead characters in Miss Wyoming (Pantheon; 311 pages; $23), Douglas Coupland's witty and hyper discourse on celebrity. Like much of his previous work (Generation X, Microserfs), it's a brilliant set of riffs that passes as a novel with mixed success...
...last two Ripley novels are slack, ungainly; Ripley is more prey than predator. But the first three (recently issued in a hardcover omnibus by Knopf/Everyman's Library) have the tone of high, dark comedy. Tom kills--Dickie, Dickie's pal Freddie Miles, an American art lover, a bunch of mafiosi--as much for the game of eluding capture as for motives of profit or survival. In Ripley's Game he gets an ailing man involved in a murder plot only because the man once spoke abruptly to Tom. Then, when the man desperately tries to kill a Mafia goon...
...find the public passion for justice quite boring and artificial," Highsmith wrote, "for neither life nor nature cares if justice is ever done or not." But she cared for Ripley, her alter ego or attractive opposite. She attributed the first book's popularity to "the insolence and audacity of Ripley himself... I often had the feeling Ripley was writing it and I was merely typing." In gratitude, she kept him forever young. The novels span 36 years, and each is set in the present; yet Tom ages only about a decade. He is the Dorian Gray of crime...
...snails. Did this adopted doyenne of Europe resent being neglected back home? At her death, in 1995, she had no U.S. publisher for her last work. And though nearly a score of films were made from her novels and short stories, most of them were European. The Talented Mr. Ripley is the first Hollywood-studio production of a Highsmith novel since Strangers on a Train...