Customer Reviews

Nothing That Meets the Eye: The Uncollected Stories of Patricia Highsmith

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

She's baaack! A second anthology of Patricia Highsmith's short fiction, this time featuring stories that have not been published until now.

Unlike the first collection of her short fiction (where many of the stories struck me as mere character sketches) the contents of "Nothing That Meets the Eye" are all fully developed short stories. One of my favorites features the subtle yet obvious menace of a stranger with candy, a very, to paraphrase the story's title, "Nice Sort of Man." The one story that fails to impress in the collection is "The Born Failure." It features a downtrodden, Job-like little man who lurches from one disappointment to the next. The story ends in an oddly sappy upbeat "It's a Wonderful Life" way, as if Highsmith suddenly got bored with cataloguing this character's misfortunes and wanted him off her hands. Interestingly enough, she didn't kill off the Failure. Possibly because for such a loser death might have seemed a kindness.

An added bonus is Paul Ingendaay's biographical essay, which follows the collected short stories. It gives a greater insight into Highsmith's literary process, touches on her lesbianism, and its probable influences on her body of work. (I'd always thought it odd that, in a wild divergence from her more mainstream suspense fiction, Highsmith had written the lesbian-themed novel, The Price of Salt, under the name of Claire Morgan.) Even more intriguing is the fact that Highsmith, apparently a meticulous literary craftsman, left behind a treasure trove of workbooks, notebooks, journals, as well as typescripts of drafts of published and unpublished works. Hopefully one day these literary artifacts will also find their way into print.

I came across this book at a bookstore's clearance sale and bought it on a whim, for which I was afterwards very grateful. This is a comprehensive collection of lively, varied stories, each one worth reading. Each is a snapshot of reality as insightful as an Edward Hopper painting, delicious for its voyeuristic glimpse into a life, often a life's last moments.

The book is proof positive of Highsmith's abilities in terms of writing from different prespectives, telling stories as a man, a woman, a young person or a middle-aged one, an American or a European. Everyone will have a different favourite here; pressed to choose, I would not agree with the choice of Mr Ingendaay, who wrote the afterword, but rather select one of the very last stories in the book, "Things had gone badly", for its implicit conclusions about how banal everyday obligations can destroy artistic creativity. "A Girl Like Phyl" is another one of the prizewinners here, an insightful reflection on the harm that can be done by letting idealised memories of an unsuccessful relationship become a fallacious yardstick for measuring other relationships. Just a few of the stories are underdeveloped, staying at the level of character sketches, but this is compensated for by the ingenious ideas that gave rise to other stories, such as the collector of counterfeits in "The Great Cardhouse". The only reason why I give this book four stars instead of five is that I felt a bit too many of the stories (I won't say which ones) ended with a suicide which occasionally felt like a Deus ex Machina. Despite that this is a book that you won't be sorry you've bought.

I am usually not a short story fan, but I can't tell you how much I enjoyed this collection. Highsmith is such a fabulous writer that you are completely drawn into her stories and can't wait to turn the page. Some of her stories in previous collections haven't been my cup of tea. But in this collection, Highsmith shows herself as a writer's writer and gives readers a wonderful gift of perfectly crafted stories that will stay with you long after you close the cover.

There's a reason some of these stories were uncollected. They don't all work, but they are all engagingly written, and most every one attempts something interesting. There are at least five gems: The Mightiest Mornings, The Pianos of the Steinachs, Man's Best Friend, Two Disagreeable Pigeons, and The Trouble with Mrs. Blynn. I'd buy it just for those stories, and there are others nearly as good too.

In my opinion this is the best collection of her short stories, each story seems better than the previous one. If you've not read any Patricia Highsmith this is a good place to begin and begin you must.