Customer Reviews

Edith's Diary (Highsmith, Patricia)

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I hope the movie The Talented Mr Ripley has brought new readers to the works of Patricia Highsmith. I started reading her books after falling in love with Hitcock's movie Strangers on a Train and hunting for the book it was based on. I have since read every Highsmith I have come across.

Edith's Diary is the one that has stuck with me. It is not like her other books which are more traditional psychological thrillers with male protagonists. It is certainly not like the Ripley books. Edith has none of the glamor and allure of Tom Ripley. She is a normal, everyday housewife who is increasingly disappointed with her life. She starts to keep a diary which becomes more real for her than her disintegrating daily life. Highsmith makes Edith's descent into insanity understandable, believable, almost inevitable, and just as creepy as any of her other stories. A beautifully written book by a great writer.

If you like Highsmith read this one. Also do not miss A Dog's Ransom, The Cry of the Owl, Found in the Street, Strangers on a Train.... etc. I am still looking for a Highsmith book I don't like. She was a genius.

Starts slow. Not much excitement till toward the last few chapters. But Highsmith delivers the intense and compelling conclusion to her novel. This novel was first published in Great Britan in 1977 when she was 56 because American publishers shied away... In a sense, Edith is more memorable than Tom Ripley.

Edith's Diary is by no means an easy book. But like all of Patricia Highsmith's novels is a masterpiece of claustrophobic suspense. I read it almost 15 years ago when I was a college student in Caracas, and believe it or not this story of a woman trapped in her home with a son from hell was a cult following novel for my generation, as well as almost all of Highsmith work. Our teachers couldn't understand our love for the american writer who choosed to live in Switzerland, she was to weird, too disturbing. I found that it was easier to find her novels in Europe and South America than in U.S.A. Now in 2000, thanks to Ripley's game and thanks to movie director Anthony Minghella, a new generation will know one of America's best and most underated authors.

This book covers an 19-year time span, covering the years 1956 - 1975. Edith is an unfulfilled housewife whose husband ignores her, whose son Clifford is a fat, indolent no-account and whose infirm relative George takes up a good portion of her time, ruling from the limited kingdom of his room.

Edith's cat, Mildred is renamed Mildew by Clifford. This seems especially significant as Edith's life appears to be decaying and the infirm George is described as a singularly foul man despite his illnesses.

Her other cat, Nelson appears to be a symbol of her own rapidly deteriorating mental health. Nelson circles the periphery of a place, just as Edith circles the periphery of madness before finally taking the plunge. An unemotional divorce, an ineffectual son and the pressures of maintaining a normal facade get to be too great for Edith. Her husband's departure appears to be somewhat anticlimatic, as does the start of his second family. Clifford, too, remains on the periphery of life. He does not appear to have any interests or apsirations. Never an able student, Clifford seeks refuge in fleeting relationships and is dismally disappointed by every woman he ever tried to woo.

Edith finally plunges into fantasy. She writes of a fictious life, one she wished she had. Edith starts by creating a fictional university background for Clifford, although the boy barely got through high school. She invents an engineering career for him and a brilliant career in that field. She creates an imaginary wife for Clifford, an imaginary wedding, imaginary children and equally imaginary lives involving all of them.

Things take a drastic turn when she begins knitting for her imaginary grandchildren, making clay busts of their heads and fully retreating into her diary. The line between reality and fantasy finally merge for Edith and she cannot turn back to reality. On April 12, 1975 she becomes a casualty of her fantasies.

This is a very sad, gritty book about how one woman succumbed to madness. It is well written with very sympathetic characters and one cannot help wondering what if Edith had had that fictitious life she wrote about in her diary.

A chilling and haunting psychological biography. thoroughly modern in its insights. A believable look at a woman sinking into madness.

In this novel, Highsmith offers readers a meandering tale of the minutae of the quiet disappointments of Edith Howland. A gentle, modest soul, Edith is quite content with the role of housewife (to a preoccupied husband) and mother (to an odd surly son). The novel opens in the mid-1950s when it wasn't uncommon for young women with literary or intellectual inclinations to forsake career for hearth and home. As an intellectual outlet, Edith publishes a village newspaper, dealing with the eternally controversial topics of birth control, abortion, quality of education in public schools, the American presence in the foreign political arena. It is significant that while Edith is a firebrand in her articles (her viewpoints inflame and alienate her fellow villagers) which purport to set the World to rights, she is singularly incapable of managing her own life. As the novel progresses, we find Edith divorced, saddled with a deceitful, drunken 20-something son, and serving as unwilling caretaker for an uncle by marriage. Edith's reaction to these life-compromising events is that of a rock embedded in a riverbed while the currents swirl around and dash against it. Edith raises passivity to an art form.

Unlike other reviewers, though, I do not believe Edith suffered a descent into madness. She was a bit delusional in that her diary (ostensibly a record of actual events) becomes a work of fiction. Consider that those who live alone are prone to fall into eccentric ways. As readers first meet Edith -- moving into a new house with her little family intact, and even though she never lives on her own for a second of the novel -- Edith remains essentially alone.

Edith's Diary is quintessential Highsmith. Ordinary characters are depicted doing ordinary acts of cruelty, selfishness, or indifference.

There was no American author as able as Patricia Highsmith ("Strangers on a Train," "The Talented Mr. Ripley,") when it came to writing suspense, and "Edith's Diary," originally published in 1977 is certainly of that genre.

It runs from roughly 1955 to 1975, and describes the life of one Edith Howland, married to journalist Brett, mother of there's-definitely-something-wrong-with-him Cliffie. We meet them as they are about to leave an apartment many would desire on Grove Street, in New York's Greenwich Village, and move to a dream house in what the author clearly means us to read as the also highly desired, artsy, Bucks County, Pennsylvania. Edith's diary, a particularly large, hardbound one with which she was once gifted as a young woman, plays an important part in the story, becoming almost another character. Mind you, not that much happens, but things deteriorate. Brett falls for his pretty new secretary and departs, leaving behind his invalid, unpleasant Uncle George, whose care falls on Edith's shoulders. Cliffie goes from bad to worse. Edith gets tired of writing depressing true stuff in her diary, and so begins filling it with happier fiction: Cliffie as a greatly successful engineer, sweetly married to a delightful girl, father to two pretty children. As the diary's fiction is so evidently preferable to her real life, Edith begins spending more and more time and energy there: she also seems to get closer to, more influenced by Cliffie, the constant companion of her loneliness.

"Edith's Diary" is placed in a domestic setting: most readers would probably agree that that was never Highsmith's strong suit. Furthermore, the story is sometimes told from Edith's point of view, sometimes from Cliffie's. This, too, created a problem for me: as I had immediately interpreted Cliffie as autistic, by today's standards, I tended to discount his point of view, and didn't find it particularly useful. Moreover, Edith is meant to be a flaming liberal-- we're told early on that Uncle George condescends to her, thought she and hubby Brett(as his politics were then, when they were married) were "babes in the wood, doomed to failure." So, there's a lot of discussion of the then-very-engrossing politics of the time: the Cuban missile crisis, the Vietnam War, Watergate. Most of this discussion, however, would no longer be of any great interest to the general reading public. Finally, the tale is also told slowly, slowly. Nor was I ever sure where the author was going: as best I could figure, Highsmith was looking to create a story illustrating what mental health professionals call a "folie a deux," or a situation in which, when two people spend a lot of time together, and the dominant partner is mentally unbalanced, the dependent partner follows the other into insanity. Or that's how the professionals explain the 1950's killing spree of Charlie Starkweather and Caryll Fugate. But maybe not. At any rate, this book isn't the place to start reading Highsmith.

...trying to make her life meaningful. - I read the book in one go as a 23 year old man. I interpreted it more as a tale of what it means to become an artist, especially a writer. Mrs. Highsmith's description of the inner life of Edith's son (down to his masturbation fantasies) convinced me once and for all that there is no barrier between the sexes when it comes to write about each other. "Edith's Diary" is for me one of the greatest American novels of this century, practically unknown in America.

I found this book fascinating - and was quite alarmed when Edith's husband kept insisting that she had to have sessions with a psychiatrist as she did not seem mad to me. She was unfortunately the product of a unloving relationship with her parents ("an only child, she and her parents were not close") who were more interested in growing prize roses than politics. As far as I can see she grew up to be uncaring about herself and that is why when Brett announces he is having an affair she reacts so very little and even agrees to have the woman in her home. She shoves reality aside in order to cope and simply hopes that Brett and Carol will split/get tired of each other. She is unable to stick up for herself and only agrees to tell Brett that she loves him (rather lamely) because her great aunt Melanie has persuaded her to do so. Edith even agrees to carry on looking after George who is totally her ex-husband's responsibility because she cannot get angry enough to make Brett take him away. She seems to be devoid of much emotion but is it simply repressed?

In the same way she virtually ignores Cliffie who is growing up to be uncaring about himself to such an extent that he cannot look presentable, get a decent job or girlfriend. The tragedy is that he is a product of his parents' lack of love for him - not autistic - and as a child he was simply ignored unless he did something wrong. His father is disappointed in him and his mother is more interested in politics. (The cycle is repeating itself - he eventually creates fantasies about Luce his unrequited love.) Edith cannot even bring herself to confront Cliffie about his secret meddling with George's drugs as she is unable to cope with the fact that she also secretly wants George out of the way.

So the fact that Edith starts to write a new reality in her diary is unsurprising, and personally I was sad that she dies so suddenly and accidentally as I think she was getting on just fine in her way, given what she had to deal with!

There's only one novel ever by Patricia Highsmith I haven't greatly enjoyed (The Glass Cage), this novel continues in the core Highsmith world-view of people subtly twisted by their personal experiences into criminal vicious & dark reactions.
I found the territory of the American educated Middle Class to be typical of her characters, but somehow the tone of this book is a bit different from most of her others. The female lead here is a bit of a Martyr, while the son shows the worst results of an over protected American Middle upbringing. Her husband is a classic cad & even manages to foist off a relative of his on Edith; strongly against her wishes & unable to summon a model for his ejection.
Its a fascinating & even genteelly horrific side of Suburbia that shows aptly what can scuttle out from our quotidian lives when a few whitewashed rocks are upturned.
The novel kept me reading with full interest from beginning to end. The son & the Old Liability of a relative are both fascinating stories, while Edith's private diary reveals the grandiose imaginings many of us have. Unlike some I feel PH does a bang-up job of conjuring up the proper Middle Class confines of the '50s & early '60s USA.
I don't want to reveal much of the action, so instead I'll repeat that I found the novel, while in familiar Highsmith territory at a bit of an oblique to the stories she usually writes. One thing I usually see is vivid, accurate portrayals of Gay men, while here the is only some sexual ambiguity in one of the characters.
The one thing that puzzles me is exactly what happens at the end. I think I got it, but I can't say I understood with certainty & I'll probably always wonder a bit about the denouncement. Still ambiguous ends are not without their merits. Well worth reading.