Customer Reviews

Deep Water

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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

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.

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.

This is a story about the complicated and very obscure structures of social life in the suburbia of New York. It's the story of the quite nice guy who becomes a murderer. The most remarkable thing in my opinion is the fact that you, as the reader, identify yourself with Vic Van Allen, the evil one, the murderer. You can understand him and his acting, you get the feeling that he is the betrayed one, the victim, but in fact he is the bad one, he is a murderer! That's very special.

Another brilliant story of bottled up emotions, of a protagonist who seems to be free of passion, seemingly has no sexual urges, takes insult with apparent lack of interest, and yet slowly builds up the pressure until he erupts.
Vic, the typically Highsmithian hero, is almost too good to be true, as a father, as a friend, as a neigbour, as an employer, as a professional. And then of course he isn't all that good. We might have guessed.
We have a hard time understanding his patience with his wife. We never quite understand how he can play along for years.
The plot starter is quite original: Vic's wife is outrageously unfaithful, but he is not yet known to be in the least jealous; surprisingly, he starts a rumour that he killed a former lover of his wife's. This is for a time quite effective in scaring away new suitors. Then, in a way unfortunately, the real killer gets caught. Vic has lost some of his status in the neighbourhood, and then he crosses the step from fantasy to reality. In order to rebuild the mystery surrounding him?
One wishes him well, hopes he will get away with it. That is the main driver of considerable suspense in this masterpiece.
One of her best.

'Deep Water' is not your typical mystery. Yes, there is murder. But we know who the murderer is and why it was committed. No, there isn't too much in the way of clever detective work. Don't expect any courtroom drama either. But overall the novel has some interesting touches.

In 'Deep Water' the author does a terrific job in making her main characters fully believable. We have a very dysfunctional couple living in idyllic New England. The wife is a lush and a slut. The husband tolerates her behavior so long as he can pursue his harmless intellectual interests. However the author then shows us how and why the husband suddenly revolts, and how the interplay between the couple then heats up in a rather unhealthy fashion. The author is also very keen on how neighbors in a close knit community can turn on each other based on hearsay and "wanting to help".


Bottom line: 'Deep Water' is a brooding character study that engages the reader bit by bit. Little in the way of "wow", but interesting nonetheless.

This is Patricia Highsmith at her best: a very good page turner, beautifuly written, with great characters and a very good plot. It starts right away and keeps the suspens on until 3 pages before the end of the book. What is not enough said is that Patricia Highsmith was a great writer, and nobody wrote better thrillers in her time. This is a masterpiece outside of the Ripleyiad, but pretty close to it. Enjoy!

As with every Highsmith book, some plots elements work better than others. Some parts of the story are believable and some aren't at all. However, that doesn't change the fact that this author knows suspense and knows how to create tension for a reader. In this story, she does it as well as she always does.

A deliciously twisted tale with a Robert Forester-like protagonist (only not the dull empty-shell Forester, but a cultivated repressed madman on the order of Poe's killer of "The Tell Tale Heart.") Book ranks with THE GLASS CELL and STRANGERS ON A TRAIN. Polite, socially adroit, likeable psycopathic Vic is one of Highsmith's most ingenious creations (likeable even after his first murder).

This book has to be one of the finest psychological character studies I have ever read. It is amazing how right Highsmith gets it.

If you like suspense, read this book. You won't be disappointed.