Do I need to read The Talented Mr. Ripley first?

Strongly recommended. Ripley Under Ground assumes familiarity with Ripley's character and the events of the first novel. Reading it cold means missing the significance of how settled his life has become — and that contrast is a large part of what the novel is doing.

Is Ripley Under Ground as good as The Talented Mr. Ripley?

Most readers find the first novel stronger because the ambition and social climbing generate more dramatic tension. Ripley Under Ground is arguably more subtle — but subtlety in a thriller is a taste, not a universal virtue. It works best as a second act to the first.

Is the art forgery plot realistic?

Highsmith did her research, and the mechanics are plausible. More importantly, her insight about how art markets construct value — and how easily that construction can be exploited by someone with confidence and precision — has aged very well.

Who shouldn't read this?

Anyone hoping Ripley has grown, changed, or acquired a conscience. He hasn't. If the absence of moral development frustrated you in the first novel, it will frustrate you more here because there is less narrative momentum to compensate.

Is there an adaptation?

Wim Wenders's The American Friend (1977) is loosely based on this novel and Ripley's Game, with Dennis Hopper as a memorably odd Ripley. It is very loose but worth seeing as a companion piece.

Ripley Under Ground by Patricia Highsmith: Summary & Discussion Questions

Summary

Tom Ripley has settled into a comfortable life in the French countryside, married to a wealthy woman, maintaining a large country house called Belle Ombre, cultivating his taste in art and jazz. He is also quietly managing a lucrative art forgery scheme with a group of friends — selling posthumous work by a dead painter named Derwatt, whose death has been concealed and whose "ongoing production" is entirely forged. When an American collector grows suspicious and threatens to expose the fraud, Ripley handles it in his characteristic fashion.

This second Ripley novel is in some ways more unsettling than the first because Ripley is now domesticated. He has a life to protect, a wife who loves him, a social position, a garden he genuinely cares about. The violence, when it arrives, is even more cold-blooded than in The Talented Mr. Ripley precisely because it is in service of preservation rather than transformation. Ripley is not becoming anyone here — he is protecting what he has already become.

Highsmith uses the art world with precision. The Derwatt forgery ring is a satire of how markets create and sustain value in cultural objects — the paintings are believed to be genuine because people want them to be, because the system of authentication is itself a kind of confidence game. Ripley's genius is that he understands how social reality is constructed and participates in its maintenance with the same cool intelligence he applies to everything else.

Readers who need The Talented Mr. Ripley's sense of momentum and social climbing may find this entry slightly flatter — Ripley is comfortable, and comfort is less dramatically interesting than aspiration. But as a study of how a moral void sustains a very pleasant existence, it is Highsmith at her most controlled and her most darkly funny. It works best read in sequence with the first novel.

Key takeaways

1.
Highsmith's second Ripley novel asks what happens when a psychopath achieves comfort: the answer is that comfort doesn't change anything fundamental, it just changes what he has to protect.
2.
The Derwatt forgery plot is a precise satire of the art market — paintings are worth what the market believes they are worth, and belief is something Ripley knows how to manufacture.
3.
Violence in this novel is maintenance, not ambition. Ripley kills to preserve his life, not to transform it, and that distinction is what makes it most chilling.
4.
Bourgeois domesticity — the house, the garden, the wine, the music — is not a cover story for Ripley but a genuine pleasure, which complicates any reading of him as simply monstrous.
5.
The novel argues that social reality is a confidence game: identity, reputation, authenticity in art — all are constructions that persist only because the right people agree to maintain them.
6.
Highsmith refuses psychological explanation for Ripley. He is not a trauma case, not a product of abuse. He simply lacks the wiring that makes most people feel guilt, and she finds this interesting rather than pathological.
7.
Tom Ripley is one of the few series antiheroes who genuinely does not develop — there is no arc, no accumulation of consequence, no toll. Highsmith regarded this as realistic, not cynical.
8.
The novel is quietly funny in the way that only very dark books can be: Ripley managing crises with the efficiency of a competent project manager is both horrifying and absurd.

Discussion questions

Use these on your own, with a book club, or as chat starters in Superbook.

1.
Ripley now has a home, a wife, a social life he genuinely values. Does that make him more sympathetic or more disturbing than the hungry striver of the first novel?
2.
The Derwatt forgery works because collectors and galleries want it to work. What does that say about authenticity — in art, in identity, in social life generally?
3.
Highsmith presents murder as a practical solution with manageable complications. How does the flatness of her prose around violence change how you experience it?
4.
Tom Ripley's wife Heloise knows something is wrong but doesn't look too closely. Is she complicit, or is Highsmith suggesting this is simply how marriages sustain themselves?
5.
Compared to the first Ripley novel, is this a more mature book — or does the removal of ambition make it a lesser one?
6.
The art world in this novel is as corrupt as Ripley himself, just more genteel about it. Does Highsmith suggest that Ripley is exceptional, or that he just operates without the usual camouflage?
7.
Ripley is acutely status-conscious about culture — he knows what good wine is, what good music is, what good painting is. Is that sensibility a satire of class aspiration, or does Highsmith take it seriously?
8.
The victim in this novel is threatening Ripley's comfortable life rather than his freedom or survival. Does the lesser stakes make the killing feel more or less monstrous?
9.
Highsmith does not explain Ripley's psychology with childhood trauma or diagnosable disorder. Is that restraint, or is it a choice that makes him more frightening?
10.
The novel ends with Ripley comfortable again. At what point in the series, if ever, would punishment feel earned — or is the whole point that the world doesn't operate that way?
11.
In Cold Blood also refuses to make murder legible through simple evil. Where do Highsmith and Capote differ in what they ask the reader to feel?
12.
If this were your first Ripley novel, would you read the others? Does knowing the pattern — murder, solution, comfort restored — make subsequent books tedious or more hypnotic?

Themes

Art and fraud Identity maintenance Violence as habit Bourgeois respectability Amorality and routine

Frequently asked questions

Do I need to read The Talented Mr. Ripley first?

Strongly recommended. Ripley Under Ground assumes familiarity with Ripley's character and the events of the first novel. Reading it cold means missing the significance of how settled his life has become — and that contrast is a large part of what the novel is doing.
Is Ripley Under Ground as good as The Talented Mr. Ripley?

Most readers find the first novel stronger because the ambition and social climbing generate more dramatic tension. Ripley Under Ground is arguably more subtle — but subtlety in a thriller is a taste, not a universal virtue. It works best as a second act to the first.
Is the art forgery plot realistic?

Highsmith did her research, and the mechanics are plausible. More importantly, her insight about how art markets construct value — and how easily that construction can be exploited by someone with confidence and precision — has aged very well.
Who shouldn't read this?

Anyone hoping Ripley has grown, changed, or acquired a conscience. He hasn't. If the absence of moral development frustrated you in the first novel, it will frustrate you more here because there is less narrative momentum to compensate.
Is there an adaptation?

Wim Wenders's The American Friend (1977) is loosely based on this novel and Ripley's Game, with Dennis Hopper as a memorably odd Ripley. It is very loose but worth seeing as a companion piece.

About Patricia Highsmith

Patricia Highsmith (1921–1995) was an American novelist and short story writer whose psychological crime fiction defined a genre. Born in Fort Worth, Texas, she spent much of her adult life in Europe. She published 22 novels and numerous short story collections, and her work has been adapted extensively for film, most notably in René Clément's Purple Noon (1960), Wim Wenders's The American Friend (1977), and Anthony Minghella's The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999). Ripley Under Ground is the second of five novels following Tom Ripley, widely considered one of literature's most compelling antiheroes.

More books by Patricia Highsmith