Type into the command line of a Linux O.S. whoami and the response will be ‘root’. Should Tom Ripley have queried his own central operating system or his soul the answer would be ‘whatever’. Ripley is a figment or a creation, a fiction, a prodigy of versimilitude composed of shy smiles, petty schemes and shiftless manoeuvring. We first meet him using the stationary of the I.R.S. which he stole while he had the job as a storeroom clerk in one of their offices. He’s writing dunning letters to various people claiming a short fall in their payments and following that up with avuncular phone calls advising them to settle. You can be anyone you like on the phone, phoney. So far all he’s been getting are cheques so the joy of the con is all that in it for him. Eventually he will take this this impersonation to the ultimate merger and will become that which he pretends to. The inconvenient existence of this persona has to lapse for this achievement.
Being an imposter is a strenuous occupation but at first it seems only a holiday by the sea in Italy near Palermo. The man that he thinks is following him because of his I.R.S. scam is none other than Greenleaf pere who is under the impression that Ripley is a great friend of his son Dickie who is trust funding his passion for painting and not inclined to come home to take up his responsibility as the heir of a large boat building business. The boy is not inclined to see this and T.R.'s mission should he accept it is to go over there and persuade him to come back. The trouble is that Tom does not really know Dickie at all but the offer of a return first class liner ticket and a wodge of money makes him decide to chance it.
Even on the boat going over he is trying on different Tom Ripleys using a cap as a prop.
He had a sudden whim for a cap and bought one in the haberdashery, a conservative bluish-grey cap of soft English wool. He could pull its visor down over nearly his whole face when he wanted to nap in his deck-chair, or wanted to look as if he were napping. A cap was the most versatile of head-gears, he thought, and he wondered why he had never thought of wearing one before? He could look like a country gentleman, a thug, an Englishman, a Frenchman, or a plain American eccentric, depending on how he wore it. Tom amused himself with it in his room in front of the mirror. He had always thought he had the world's dullest face, a thoroughly forgettable face with a look of docility that he could not understand, and a look also of vague fright that he had never been able to erase. A real conformist's face, he thought. The cap changed all that. It gave him a country air, Greenwich, Connecticut, country. Now he was a young man with a private income, not long out of Princeton, perhaps. He bought a pipe to go with the cap.
He is reinventing himself and the smoothness of the sleight of hand as he gets Dickie Greenleaf to accept him as an acquaintance from an established cadre of socially sound people is quite excellent:
'You don't seem to remember me from New York,' Tom said.
'I can't really say I do,' Dickie said. 'Where did I meet you?'
'I think—Wasn't it at Buddy Lankenau's?' It wasn't, but he knew Dickie knew Buddy Lankenau, and Buddy was a very respectable fellow.
So far we are with Ripley trying to pull himself into a new life, to make something of himself. It’s when he begins to make someone of himself other than his own self that we begin to draw back and resist identification with a man who has not got a firm grip on his identity. Tom you see is his own creature enjoying the translucence of consciousness. Like a sage of psychopathy he does not identify with any collection of personal attributes as a given ground of ‘lived experience’. He lives his experience a different way uniting its elements with the desire to absorb the other. In every way this novel is a psychopathic farce, an homicidal ‘Charley’s Aunt’. The posse are the front door he goes out by the french window and joins them round the front to call on himself. Highsmith puts him into situations that make us gasp and stretch our eyes as he lies and lies and gets away with it.
By the way forget the film which blunts the evil for the sake of interiors and beautiful knitware, the book’s the thing.
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