Deep Waterby Patricia Highsmith
Rating: ★★★★
Publication Date: January 1, 1957
Genre: mystery: silver age (1950-1979)
Pages: 271
ReRead?: No
Project: a century of women
In Deep Water, set in the quiet, small town of Little Wesley, Patricia Highsmith has created a vicious and suspenseful tale of love gone sour. Vic and Melinda Van Allen's loveless marriage is held together only by a precarious arrangement whereby, in order to avoid the messiness of divorce, Melinda is allowed to take any number of lovers as long as she does not desert her family. Eventually, Vic can no longer suppress his jealousy and tries to win back his wife by asserting himself through a tall tale of murder — one that soon comes true. In this complex portrayal of a dangerous psychosis emerging in the most unlikely of places, Highsmith examines the chilling reality behind the idyllic facade of American suburban life.
Gone Girl, Gillian Flynn and domestic suspense don’t exist without Patricia Highsmith.
OK, maybe that is an overstatement – after all, it’s entirely possible that someone not named Patricia Highsmith would have come up with domestic suspense had she not published Ripley, Strangers on a Train and a book like Deep Water. Nonetheless, there is a through-line between Patricia Highsmith and books like Gone Girl.
Patricia Highsmith does not screw around, but she does mess with the reader’s head. And no one that I’ve read describes murder with so much visceral banality. When someone is murdered on the page in a Highsmith book, it is so extraordinarily disturbing – explained with clinical detachment, but also with rapt attention to the physical details and experience of murder.
Deep Water is the exploration of a man who is slowly cracking, but the facade is so resilient and convincing that it takes about 300 pages for him to completely unravel. The ending is utterly unavoidable and still shocking.