Publisher's Weekly Review
While British journalist Wilson's portrait of Highsmith (1921-1995) is neither graceful nor fluid, it is as haunting and as chilling as the stories and novels Highsmith crafted over more than 50 productive years. The author of Strangers on a Train and five novels featuring the amoral and murderous Tom Ripley, Highsmith achieved considerable critical acclaim in her native United States, but never sold well here. She was better received in Europe and that was where she made her home. The biographer's exhaustive attention to detail coupled with his access to Highsmith's journals (or "cahiers," as she called them) and letters, and extensive interviews with her friends, lovers and associates, allow him to reveal in excruciating detail this very private person. Highsmith emerges as a woman of great intelligence, candor and curiosity, but also as a racially prejudiced, anti-Semitic and insensitive boor. She was an acute observer capable of seizing a single incident and transforming it into a complex story. But she was unable to transform her own unhappy life. Instead she transmuted her troubles, her experiences, her observations into her work. One of her lovers observed, "If she hadn't had her work, she would have been sent to an insane asylum or an alcoholics' home.... She was her writing." Highsmith's work has had an important impact on both crime fiction and gay and lesbian fiction, and Wilson has impressively documented that as well as the tremendous cost Highsmith paid for her achievements. 16 pages of b&w photos not seen by PW. (July 15) Forecast: Interest in Highsmith was revived when the film of The Talented Mr. Ripley was released in 1999, and a little Highsmith mini-industry is cropping up. Many of her works are being reissued by Norton; others are available from Vintage and Grove. (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
A closely drawn portrait of the writer who "celebrated irrationality, chaos and emotional anarchy, and regarded the criminal as the perfect example of the twentieth-century existentialist hero." British journalist Wilson uses Highsmith's diaries, notebooks, letters, and interviews to catch (in her own words) her "moods, fits, and daily activities." Perhaps best known for Strangers on a Train and her Ripley novels, Highsmith (1921-95) was never easy on her readers, says Wilson. Her work was often macabre and transgressive, noir and existential, drawing upon evil's banality and life's strange forces ("Each person carries around in himself a terrible other world of hell and the unknown," she wrote in her notebook). Highsmith herself comes across as a distinctive character: she was reserved ("This is the tragedy of the conscience-stricken young homosexual, that he not only conceals his sex objectives, but conceals his humanity and natural warmth of heart as well," she wrote, though she later became comfortable with her lesbianism); footloose; bereft of moral certainties ("I myself have a criminal bent. . . . I have a lurking liking for those who flout the law which I realise is despicable of me"); maybe even, as a friend noted, possessing "a form of high-functioning Asperger's Syndrome." Her relationships were many and urgent, and she had a quirky enough character to provide diverting stories, like the one of smuggling pet snails into France by hiding them under her breasts. But it's the dark side that most fascinates Wilson, the warped perspectives of Highsmith's central characters, their attractions and antagonisms, and her desire "to explore the diseases produced by sexual repression . . . like peculiar vermin in a stagnant well." Perhaps no one "can document a life in all its richness," but Wilson has come close, getting at Highsmith from a number of angles and showing the splinters of identity in his subject that she herself found so captivating. (Two 8-page b&w photo inserts, not seen) Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Choice Review
When she died in 1995, novelist and short story writer Patricia Highsmith left behind a vast number of personal papers, including diaries, notebooks, and letters. Wilson used these materials to great advantage, supplementing them with information gleaned in numerous interviews with, and letters from, Highsmith's friends and acquaintances. He reconstructs Highsmith's day-to-day life in great detail and explores the emotional life of this very private person, particularly as it centered around her lesbian relationships. Perhaps most important, Wilson situates Highsmith's novels and short stories--among them Strangers on a Train and The Talented Mr. Ripley--in the context of her life and of the social and intellectual milieu surrounding her. The book is not without its faults. Highsmith never really understood herself, and Wilson is not much more successful at understanding her than she was. Moreover, the book is rather carelessly written. But even with these shortcomings, Beautiful Shadow stands as an impressive biography of a writer whose reputation is steadily rising. Photos, notes. ^BSumming Up: Highly recommended. All collections, all levels. J. L. Culross Eastern Kentucky University