If only Patricia Highsmith (1921-1995) had been alive to see the thunderous critical response to the publication of the best-selling The Selected Stories of Patricia Highsmith in 2001. Now the Highsmith renaissance continues with this brilliant collection of 28 short stories, a great majority of which have never been seen before. The stories assembled in Nothing That Meets the Eye, written between 1938 and 1982, are vintage Highsmith: a gigolo-like psychopath preys on unfulfilled career women; a lonely spinster's fragile hold on reality is tethered to the bottle; an estranged postal worker invents homicidal fantasies about his coworkers. While some stories anticipate the diabolical narratives of the Ripley novels, others possess a Capra-like sweetness that forces us to see the author in a new light. From this new collection, a remarkable portrait of the American psyche at mid-century emerges, unforgettably distilled by the inimitable eye of Patricia Highsmith.
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From Publishers Weekly
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.
The train, which had been following a clean little river for more than an hour, rounded a wooded bend, blew its whistle, and puffed serenely toward a tiny town at the foot of a mountain. Read the first page
Concordance
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Back Cover
Customer Reviews
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.
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.
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.
