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Nothing
That Meets The Eye
Patricia Highsmith
Bloomsbury,
2005
Paperback
first
collection? No
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Patricia Highsmith was born in
Texas, USA in 1921 and
raised first by her maternal grandmother in New York City and later by
her mother and stepfather, who were both commercial artists. Best known
for her psychological thrillers, including Strangers on a Train
and the Ripley
series, Highsmith also wrote many short stories. She died in
Switzerland in 1995.
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"What
were they talking about? How they must hate the bench arm between them!
And she felt a taut, righteous satisfaction that the iron bar was
between them. What would the park be like without the iron arms? Men
sleeping along benches. Couples…"
Reviewed by Sarah Hilary
There’s a
wicked pleasure to be had from reading Patricia Highsmith’s short
stories, a pricking of the thumbs as you turn the page, waiting to find
out what will happen to the demure spinsters and disappointed men of
early middle age. Highsmith takes trouble to construct the details of
their domestic lives, cutting her cloth with confident, convincing
slices of the scissors, but the reader senses a fraying-at-the-edges
almost as soon as the stories begin. Something is amiss, the people
here are balanced too precariously at the edges of their lives, a
little snip here and there and they will fall. The interest lies in
watching which way they tumble and how hard they fight to keep that
awkward balance.
Once or twice, Highsmith tips her own balance from cool economy towards
sadism, in the fate to which she delivers her heroes and heroines. We
sense, for instance, in The
Second Cigarette, that she despises the dull, fleshy
George who’s haunted by visions of his other self to the point of a
pantomime-suicide. In The
Mightiest Mornings, the earliest story in the collection,
Aaron is escaping, trying for a new start in a small town where he
isn’t known (a recurrent theme in Highsmith’s writing). He falls in
with a skinny barefoot child, Freya, and briefly feels happy before the
town’s disapproval drives him away. Whether or not Highsmith was
inviting the reader to judge Aaron on his weakness in wanting the
town’s approbation or his failure to stay in one place and get on with
the messy business of living – we do judge him, and we find him wanting.
When Highsmith tells a similar story from the perspective of the child,
the results are far more satisfying. A
Mighty Nice Man
is a terrifically clever and disturbing story about a stranger who
arrives in a dusty town where two small sisters are so bored they beg
for his attention. The stranger lures the boldest child away and it
isn’t until they’re in his car that she starts to sense his predatory
sexual interest in her. Highsmith has a final twist up her sleeve. The
girls’ mother is as bored and penniless as her children and wistfully
invites the stranger to take them all driving whenever he wants. This
time it is the sanction which drives the man away, in sharp contrast to
Aaron from the earlier story. Our attention switches from the stranger
to the family left behind, opening up a whole new level of nightmare.
There are quieter stories here, but it is rare to find one in which a
monster of some description does not lurk. The Trouble with Mrs Blynn, the
Trouble with the World is a sensitively told story of a
woman dying without, she thinks, too many regrets. We are struck at the
outset with the sense that she is at peace with her fate. Mrs Blynn,
the attending nurse who brings the pain relief, has her eye on the
woman’s amethyst brooch and slyly prompts her patient to roll-call
regrets we thought she didn’t have. Mrs Blynn is a formidable example
of Highsmith’s control over character and her power to manipulate the
reader’s emotions in many directions at once. There is a deliciously
poisonous irony too, in the fact of Mrs Blynn being the one with the
pain relief, coldly sedating the heroine as she lowers the last of the
woman’s defences. Highsmith does not deal in palliatives. Her stories,
even the amusing ones, are hard lessons in life’s disappointments, its
darkness and its depths.
A last word about the title story in the collection, Nothing that Meets the Eye.
Helene, a quite ordinary woman of a forty-five, finds herself besieged
by suitors at a Swiss resort. Offers of marriage, jealous lovers and
baffled wives all flock to her door. At first she blames the altitude,
but when it dawns on Helene that her allure is her lack of need for the
company of others, she takes drastic action. "All these people want me
only because I don’t need them any longer… It’s ironic, but perfectly
human, after all. They think I won’t take anything from them, and
they’re right."
"Perfectly human", in this story, seems another way of saying
monstrous. This is Highsmith’s greatest skill: skewing our perspective,
not by much but enough for us to see the monster under the
smoothly-made bed.
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