Deep Water [Import] [Paperback]

Patricia Highsmith (Author)

Product Details

• Paperback
• Publisher: Vintage
• ISBN-10: 0099283085
• ISBN-13: 978-0099283089
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (13 customer reviews)

More About the Author

Patricia Highsmith (1921-1995) was the author of more than twenty novels, including Strangers on a Train, The Price of Salt and The Talented Mr. Ripley, as well as numerous short stories.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

22 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The pages turn very fast indeed...., November 12, 2003

By 

Debra Hamel (North Haven, CT) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Deep Water (Paperback)

Thirty-six-year-old Victor Van Allen is being cuckolded, quite blatantly. For a number of years his wife Melinda has paraded a succession of lovers around their small town of Little Wesley, Massachusetts, dragging the men along to the Van Allens' dinner engagements with friends, dancing with them provocatively, entertaining them in night-long debauches in the Van Allens' home. Victor's friends shake their heads or offer him extra desserts at parties--pity food--and they marvel at his reaction to the insult: Victor is a paragon of patience. He allows Melinda her lovers, only wishing that she attracted a higher quality paramour. Still, Victor is not as unconcerned about Melinda's behavior as he appears. He regularly forces himself to stay awake and chaperone his wife's "dates" in their living room rather than please the couple by retiring to his separate bedroom. And, near the beginning of the novel, Victor announces to his wife's most recent flame that he once killed a lover of hers, a certain Malcolm McRae. Victor is lying, but McRae *had* been pummeled to death in his New York apartment, and his murderer had not been identified.

This being a Patricia Highsmith novel, it cannot be a good thing for our put-upon protagonist to confess to a murder he did not commit, and the reader begins at once to wonder how this misstep of Victor's will lead to his undoing. But it is unlikely that readers will correctly anticipate precisely how Victor's story plays itself out.

Patricia Highsmith--the author of, among many other novels, Strangers on a Train and The Talented Mister Ripley--is a master of suspense. Deep Water shares with her other books a certain remarkable slowness. Highsmith's characters unhurriedly attend to the minutiae of their lives. They entertain friends and admire artwork and do the gardening, they take drives and prepare supper. Very often it seems that nothing is happening in one of her books, and yet as the pages turn the reader becomes more and more tense, wondering when precisely the axe will fall--for it certainly will fall. By the end of Deep Water the pages turn very fast indeed.

[Deep Water also shares with some of Highsmith's other novels (Found in the Street) a bizarre vision of parenthood. The Van Allens have a highly disposable daughter, perhaps eight years old, who spends her days in other people's homes, or playing contentedly by herself in her own room. She is sometimes left alone in the house. She is abandoned at the movies when her mother forgets to pick her up. Meanwhile the Van Allens' social calendar is chock full of late-night dinner parties and those uncomfortable threesomes in the living room. Part of this abuse of the daughter has to do with the storyline: Melinda is intended to be a very poor mother. But Victor, the "good" parent, leaves the house for those parties just as often as his wife does.]

Reviewed by Debra Hamel, author of Trying Neaira: The True Story of a Courtesan's Scandalous Life in Ancient Greece

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars At last . . ., August 10, 2003

By 

"vortex87" (Picnic Point, NSW Australia) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Deep Water (Paperback)

I'm happy that this -- one of Patricia Highsmith's finest novels -- is back in print, because it deserves to be read.
The set-up is that Vic and Melinda are unhappily married, but rather than divorce, since they have a daughter, he lets her go off and have affairs (this seems quite an interesting concept to have proposed in 1957, when this book came out) -- and you'd think that surely, a little jealousy might come in on his part, right? Right. . . . And from here, it goes off in some interesting directions. I really didn't expect the ending. And now that it's finally available, go ahead and get it! You're missing a great novel otherwise.

12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Typical Highsmith, May 19, 2006

By 

K. Dain Ruprecht (Dallas, TX) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: Deep Water (Paperback)

This book, written in the late 1950's, is about an intelligent, sensitive, and wealthy society man who is married to a nasty stupid alcoholic sl-t who OPENLY cheats on him with a succession of random men. He puts up with it for a long time and then he kills one of her lovers. He "gets away with it" for a while... It's a typical Highsmith theme. But there are some interesting undercurrents. The husband is reluctant to divorce his wife, and yet he admits to himself that he has no desire whatsoever to sleep with her -- or any other woman, for that matter. The implication is that he is gay. This is another typical Highsmith theme. The strangest thing is not her penchant for stories about ordinary people who commit atrocious crimes on a whim -- it's her PACING. Personally, I find it mesmerizing. She just "normalizes" the hell out of everything by taking her protagonist through his day detail by detail -- what he wears, what he cooks for dinner, etc. Then he commits murder, disposes of the body -- and goes back home and makes dessert. She almost never makes any personal judgements about her characters, although her protagonists tend to be highly intelligent and culturally refined men. Their killings tend to appear "justified" in that the victims are stupid and/or smarmy. A lifelong lesbian, HIghsmith can be really unsympathetic to her female characters, especially if they have big behinds. (her male protagonists frequently express disgust with pear-shaped women). Her world view is pretty skewed, messed up even. I mean, she was a MISOGYNIST LESBIAN, for God's sake. But it's so refreshing, especially compared to all the kinetic, wordy, phony, ultra-PC, show-offy new fiction out there today. This is not really one of Highsmith's BEST (that would be, IMO, "Edith's Diary", "This Sweet Sickness", "A Tremor of Forgery" or "The Price of Salt") but it is well worth reading if you love her style as much as I do.