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What it argues
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.
What it gets right
- 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.
What it covers
Who wrote it
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.
