“THE MAIN THING about impersonation,” Ripley muses midway through the novel, after having acquired some expertise in the field, “was to maintain the mood and temperament of the person one was impersonating.” Both the novel and Minghella’s chillingly decorative film begin with a case of misidentification: The nondescript Ripley is taken by the shipbuilding magnate Herbert Greenleaf for an Ivy League classmate of his wayward son, Richard, known as Dickie. Dispatched to a small Mediterranean town in southern Italy to retrieve him, Ripley is seduced by Greenleaf’s languorous life of martini lunches and afternoons on the beach. It’s hard to know which Ripley wants more: to sleep with Greenleaf or to be Greenleaf, who has a boat, a closet full of bespoke clothing and a beautiful signet ring — not to mention the kind of assurance of a man who believes he deserves what he has and will always have more. (What he doesn’t have is talent: In the novel, Greenleaf is the kind of amateur artist who paints sunsets in his girlfriend’s eyes; in the film, he’s a jazz aficionado.) Highsmith never overplays her hand in winning our sympathies for Ripley, but the ironic tension of the setup is clear enough. Who is really the fraud, the empty-headed playboy who gets by on connections and unearned income, or the unprivileged striver? Once Ripley bludgeons Greenleaf to death with an oar on a boating trip, covering his tracks and assuming his victim’s identity, the real mystery isn’t who committed the crime but why we can’t help rooting for him. Some readers might even go so far as to identify with Ripley, including those of us who grew up as code-switchers, or who have, metaphorically or otherwise, built new lives on foreign shores.
This is Highsmith’s brilliance as a novelist, her way of making us experience life as a tightening noose, making us complicit, effectively separating us from our humanity. In early reviews of the book — which was, until after her death in 1995, generally received as genre entertainment rather than the mordant anatomization of American class that it is — the character was often described as a sociopath. But I think Highsmith’s flouting of ethical certainties, her disinterest in justice, read differently today. Ripley is many things — an unloved orphan who grew into a man believing he deserved better; a queer kid bullied for being “a sissy”; an aesthete sensitive to ugliness marooned within a pragmatic and sensually stunted culture (an arrangement of fruit in his first-class stateroom is enough to improve his mood) — but a criminal mastermind he is not. Ripley’s sexuality is far less ambiguous in the film: Minghella adds a bath scene in which a disrobed Greenleaf (Jude Law, in his prime) plays a game of chess with a clothed Ripley, who awkwardly asks if he can join him in the tub. In Minghella’s film, unlike the novel, the murder is a crime of passion, not premeditation, a passion that might be read not only as desire or obsession but as a form of queer rage, perhaps: a closeted man’s revenge against his own marginalization and the easy privilege of his straight peers. In the novel, Ripley is in the closet even to himself; queerness is kept at the level of insinuation on the part of Marge, Greenleaf’s casual girlfriend, who is envious of the boys’ nascent friendship. In later Ripley novels — Highsmith wrote four more — he acquires, unconvincingly, a wife. Highsmith is, of course, a writer, not a therapist, but her rendering of Ripley’s descent into murder suggests how identity occluded by society might fracture into pathology. But more striking to me now is that while Highsmith allows Ripley the freedom to kill in the novels that bear her name, she won’t allow him to come out even in his own thoughts. Ripley is poignant today because we know he never will embrace the truth of himself on any level. As Frank Bidart put it in his 2012 poem “Queer”: “Lie to yourself about this and you will / forever lie about everything.”
What feels ruthless today, then, isn’t the character but the context: the pretense of American liberty and meritocracy. In a world increasingly divided into Greenleafs and Ripleys, surely there are more than a few of us who have wished to wield a figurative oar at those who fail upward, buoyed by Daddy’s money, tax loopholes and prep-school connections. It should be noted that, as universal and quintessentially American as the book is, it is not complicated by race (that story has been told, too, albeit from a white perspective, in John Guare’s 1990 play, “Six Degrees of Separation”). Still, it’s hard not to read “Ripley” now and see it as a damning portrait of white male privilege, showing us how a white male is presumed credible, that he can slip beneath any wire and is always taken at his word. Jared Kushner is Dickie Greenleaf, buying his way into Harvard, but he is also Tom Ripley: He gets away with it because of how he looks. How, then, should we think about an author at once so cleareyed about the social mores of the time and yet so mired in them? If we now can embrace Ripley, what about his author, whose queer villains, written with compassion tinged with disgust, were largely stand-ins for herself? (While Highsmith wasn’t ashamed of her own sexuality, she resisted being known as a “lesbian author” and preferred to write about men, just as she preferred the company of men — except, of course, in bed.) Finally, if we “get” Ripley now, do we have social progress to thank, or is it because “sociopathy” simply looks an awful lot like getting by in contemporary America?
Highsmith’s atmospheric unease — her keen sense of the depths concealed by pleasing surfaces — has made her irresistible for film directors, but Ripley’s interiority has always been difficult to pull off onscreen. Many skilled actors have tried, including Alain Delon and John Malkovich in 1960 and 2002, respectively, playing the character in a more silken vein than the earnest Damon, who seemed credibly working-class, neither smooth nor especially clever. It’s far easier, of course, to be drawn in by Ripley in the book, where he remains as featureless as a Waldorf doll. This may also be why our contemporary frauds seem to pale in comparison to the real thing: It’s not because Ripley’s so audacious but because he’s on such intimate terms with us; the connoisseur of imposture has become the connoisseur’s impostor. Even the thriller writer Dan Mallory (a.k.a., A.J. Finn), who sought pity from publishing-industry colleagues and admissions committees by inventing tragic illnesses and deaths, abandoned a doctoral thesis at Oxford on Highsmith’s novels in the aughts, as if sensing he wasn’t quite up to the task. Ripley was a murderer, but he had a code; “he doesn’t kill unless he has to,” as the author put it.