by Patricia Highsmith
In "Deep Water," (1957) Highsmith gives us Vic, a pudgy, Thurber-esque character with a virago for a wife, who might get her comeuppance as in Thurber's "The Unicorn in the Garden." But this is Highsmith, and we can pretty reliably predict that the novel will take a darker turn.
The reader initially sees Vic, the long-suffering husband to his inebriate, nymphomaniac wife, Melinda, who has no qualms about bringing her boyfriends around to the house and letting Vic make dinner for them. But Vic prides himself on being civil and has consolations. He's built his own wing on the house where he raises snails and does experiments with bed bugs and fiddles around with foxgloves by depriving them of sunlight for long periods. He has an independent income in addition to what his tiny and exclusive printing press makes in carefully chosen and hand printed books. He's devoted to the couples' small daughter, Trixie.
Highsmith plunges the reader into this maelstrom of a marriage without much backstory:
Everybody considered [Vic] odd for enduring [Melinda's behavior], but Vic didn't mind at all being considered odd. In fact, he was proud of it in a country in which most people aimed at being exactly like everybody else. Melinda had been odd, too, or he never would have married her. Courting her and persuading her to marry him had been like breaking a wild horse, except that the process had to be infinitely more subtle.
A close reading of this passage reveals that Vic enjoys the slow process of psychological domination, and he hardly views his wife as a person, merely an animal to manipulate--like his snails or bedbugs. The only weapon Melinda has is to fail to react to this domination with rage, drunkenness, or some other emotional outburst. Melinda is slow to realize this. Which keeps Vic generally happy.
Lately, however, Vic and Melinda's friends have been openly asking him why he doesn't take Melinda in hand. Vic is discomfited by these imprecations, not on his masculinity, but on his ability to dominate. When one of Melinda's ex-boyfriends is murdered, Vic deflects this criticism handily by implying that he is the murderer. His friends think it might be a joke, albeit a tasteless one. But the rumor raises Vic's status and scares off many of Melinda's would-be boyfriends. This makes Melinda angry and miserable. Which makes Vic happy, and he goes back to tutoring his daughter, his snails and bedbugs and foxgloves and picking out end marks for his books of poetry with renewed vigor.
This happy period does not last when the real murderer of Melinda's former lover is found, and she takes a shine to a new boyfriend, one whom Vic finds particularly loathsome, not so much because Charley is boinking Melinda, but because he is unattractive and is only a middling musician. Vic seems to feel that this choice reflects poorly on Melinda ... and perhaps on him. So, at a neighborhood pool party, Vic finds himself alone in the pool with Charley, and drowns him. Then the weirdness really kicks in.
Highsmith's ability to get into the mind of a psychopath probably reached its apex in the first two Ripley novels. She shows the reader a character who seems only slightly "off," and then slowly peels away the layers of normality to show just how deep that "off-ness" goes. But, while Ripley's victims have a chance of getting away, Melinda is married to Vic, and in the days before no-fault divorce, escaping him seems much harder. Plus they have a small child. The domestic setting increases the horror of the situation as the reader watches Vic's descent.
***
Most of Highsmith's psychopaths are men. For those looking to see what she does with female counterparts to Vic and Ripley, I recommend "Little Tales of Misogyny," a short story collection of truly scary women who terrorize their families.
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