Anxiety and Evil in the Writings of Patricia Highsmith (review)

Though relatively few in number, practically every critical assessment of Patricia Highsmith has been forced to grapple with its subject’s well-known misanthropy, explaining, if never quite forgiving, the blunt hostility of an author whose acerbity permeated both her fiction and her life. “She wasn’t nice,” Joan Schenkar wryly observes in her recent biography of Highsmith. “Plain speech was her usual style, and what she didn’t see was the way other people pictured the world. So in the acid bath of her detail-saturated prose she developed her own image of an alternate earth—Highsmith country.”¹ In characterizing Highsmith as a writer so fundamentally at odds with her environment that her work came to reflect the chilly tenor of her life, Schenkar highlights some of the author’s most notorious qualities: her seeming incapacity for empathy; the flat matter-of-factness of her prose, which casually registers a subject like murder yet offers meticulous and sensitive accounts of material objects; and her frank depictions of sexual ambiguity, the burdens of community, and the violence of everyday life.

Because of these traits, Highsmith has always struggled to maintain an academic or popular following, despite the formal and thematic intricacy of her fiction. Fiona Peters’s Anxiety and Evil in the Writings of Patricia Highsmith seeks to change this state of affairs by taking on the daunting yet laudable task of explaining why the terrain of Highsmith country has proven so rough for its readers, and thus of establishing more firmly Highsmith’s critical reputation. Part of the problem, Peters argues, is that “[r]eading Highsmith is a discomforting experience, and . . . a central element of that discomfort lies in the ways that the clarity of her writing is developed as a cover for the radical insubstantiality that it conceals” (2–3). Her book explores how the unyielding directness with which Highsmith renders subjects like evil, anxiety, and the absence of desire emphasizes an “ontological blankness” that permeates her fiction, and, in so doing, has prevented her from achieving “an established place within any genre” (17, 2).

In embarking upon this project of critical recovery, Peters’s aims are threefold: first, “to demonstrate and consider the range of Highsmith’s oeuvre,” second, “to identify the central themes and preoccupations running through her writing career,” and third, “to attempt what might [be] called a certain dislocation of her work vis-à-vis the crime fiction genre” (189). This is a broad premise from which to proceed, and it belies the theoretical specificity of the book as a whole. Deeply psychoanalytic in its approach, Anxiety and Evil is not for theoretical novices, let alone newcomers to Highsmith’s fiction. It is not, in other words, a broad overview of Highsmith’s career so much as a focused psychoanalytic inquiry into a wide range of her texts.

Peters begins with a lengthy methodological introduction that situates Highsmith within the framework of psychoanalysis, drawing heavily upon Jacques Lacan and Slavoj Žižek in order to explain Highsmith’s characteristically fraught representations of psychological turmoil (and, in many cases, of its absence). She follows her introduction with three long chapters, each of which addresses a significant group of Highsmith’s novels and, occasionally, short stories, united by a common theme. Chapter one considers Deep Water (1957), The Cry of the Owl (1962), and This Sweet Sickness (1960), three novels featuring protagonists who exist in a perpetual stasis that Peters identifies as a “psychic waiting room,” or a protective yet liminal psychic space in which characters “find themselves suspended from life and thus unable to engage in meaningful actions or projects” (37). Chapter two examines later novels in relation to the concept of exile, which Peters links somewhat to Highsmith’s political imagination, but more prominently to persistent forms of anxiety. By this formulation, a novel like The Tremor of Forgery (1969), which features an American protagonist living out a self-imposed exile in Tunisia, “is marked not so...