Deep Water

Rating:
Summary: At last . . .
Review: I'm happy that this -- one of Patricia Highsmith's finest novels -- is back in print, because it deserves to be read.
The set-up is that Vic and Melinda are unhappily married, but rather than divorce, since they have a daughter, he lets her go off and have affairs (this seems quite an interesting concept to have proposed in 1957, when this book came out) -- and you'd think that surely, a little jealousy might come in on his part, right? Right. . . . And from here, it goes off in some interesting directions. I really didn't expect the ending. And now that it's finally available, go ahead and get it! You're missing a great novel otherwise.

Rating:
Summary: The pages turn very fast indeed....
Review: Thirty-six-year-old Victor Van Allen is being cuckolded, quite blatantly. For a number of years his wife Melinda has paraded a succession of lovers around their small town of Little Wesley, Massachusetts, dragging the men along to the Van Allens' dinner engagements with friends, dancing with them provocatively, entertaining them in night-long debauches in the Van Allens' home. Victor's friends shake their heads or offer him extra desserts at parties--pity food--and they marvel at his reaction to the insult: Victor is a paragon of patience. He allows Melinda her lovers, only wishing that she attracted a higher quality paramour. Still, Victor is not as unconcerned about Melinda's behavior as he appears. He regularly forces himself to stay awake and chaperone his wife's "dates" in their living room rather than please the couple by retiring to his separate bedroom. And, near the beginning of the novel, Victor announces to his wife's most recent flame that he once killed a lover of hers, a certain Malcolm McRae. Victor is lying, but McRae *had* been pummeled to death in his New York apartment, and his murderer had not been identified.

This being a Patricia Highsmith novel, it cannot be a good thing for our put-upon protagonist to confess to a murder he did not commit, and the reader begins at once to wonder how this misstep of Victor's will lead to his undoing. But it is unlikely that readers will correctly anticipate precisely how Victor's story plays itself out.

Patricia Highsmith--the author of, among many other novels, *Strangers on a Train* and *The Talented Mister Ripley*--is a master of suspense. *Deep Water* shares with her other books a certain remarkable slowness. Highsmith's characters unhurriedly attend to the minutiae of their lives. They entertain friends and admire artwork and do the gardening, they take drives and prepare supper. Very often it seems that nothing is happening in one of her books, and yet as the pages turn the reader becomes more and more tense, wondering when precisely the axe will fall--for it certainly will fall. By the end of *Deep Water* the pages turn very fast indeed.

[*Deep Water* also shares with some of Highsmith's other novels (*Found in the Street*) a bizarre vision of parenthood. The Van Allens have a highly disposable daughter, perhaps eight years old, who spends her days in other people's homes, or playing contentedly by herself in her own room. She is sometimes left alone in the house. She is abandoned at the movies when her mother forgets to pick her up. Meanwhile the Van Allens' social calendar is chock full of late-night dinner parties and those uncomfortable threesomes in the living room. Part of this abuse of the daughter has to do with the storyline: Melinda is intended to be a very poor mother. But Victor, the "good" parent, leaves the house for those parties just as often as his wife does.]

Rating:
Summary: Special
Review: This is a story about the complicated and very obscure structures of social life in the suburbia of New York. It's the story of the quite nice guy who becomes a murderer. The most remarkable thing in my opinion is the fact that you, as the reader, identify yourself with Vic Van Allen, the evil one, the murderer. You can understand him and his acting, you get the feeling that he is the betrayed one, the victim, but in fact he is the bad one, he is a murderer! That's very special.