What is Ripley Under Ground about?

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.