Those Who Walk Away by Patricia Highsmith
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In a review I did not read, Slavoj Zizek, the famous philosopher who has destroyed media literacy, describes this novel as Highsmith’s masterpiece.
Of the three Highsmith novels I’ve read, this is structurally the most interesting but also less interesting to me personally than the others, which play with the expectations of different genres. I described Strangers on a Train to being structured like a romance despite being a psychological thriller and described The Price of Salt to being structured like a psychological thriller despite being a romance.
This novel begins with our protagonist getting shot by his father in law.
We don’t know their relationship at the time, and so it’s quite a start to a novel. They’re having an argument, but not a particularly heated one. The younger man seems to want to explain something to the elder. And then he gets shot.
A man gets shot, but the bullet only grazes his arm. Though his father in law leaves him for dead, they end up bumping into one another in a few days. Again, the younger tries to explain himself to the elder, as if the need to be understood outweighs the fear of death.
The father in law, in a later encounter, pushes him into the Venice canals where he would have drowned had it not been for a passing boat.
The backstory comes out gradually and we learn that Ray Garrett’s wife committed suicide while on their honeymoon. Ed Coleman, her father, blames Ray and has taken things into his own hands to get revenge.
Class resentment, familial love, and the desire to be understood rest at the center of this novel. Which seems to be the real theme of Highsmith’s work, to me. I’ve never heard her considered an existentialist or mentioned among existentialist thinkers, but this novel, more than the other two, feels like it sits between Notes from the Underground and The Stranger.
Ray needs to be understood. It drives him to continually try to make Ed hear him out, listen to his side. This man who has attempted to kill him twice becomes a bit of an obsession for him. He wants Ed to know that the death of his daughter was not his fault.
After the second attempt, Ray chooses to disappear for a while. And here we fall deeper into ideas of identity and anonymity. For a week, he lives like someone else. He even goes on a date with a local Italian girl, becomes friends with the man who saved him and his friends and family.
Meanwhile, the police are looking for him.
See, Ray is a rich boy. His family wants to know what happened to him and so they begin snooping around Ed, who was the last to see him in Venice.
Ed is a serial monogamist who has a tendency to find rich women who pay for his lifestlye as an expatriot artist and he’s surrounded himself with a society of wealth. They all vouch for him, despite hearing the ways he talked about Ray and how he holds Ray responsible for his daughter’s suicide.
After about a week, Ray is seen by Ed and the adventure ends. He must return to his own life, but then, after another violent disagreement, Ed disappears.
Interestingly, the POV of the novel bounces back and forth between these two men. And perhaps more interesting, I found myself sort of rooting for Ed, despite him being violent and boorish and awful in nearly every way.
But at least he wants something. At least he lives for something. At least he forged himself a life and identity.
Ray is a passive man. A barely there man. Which is, perhaps, why his disappearance feels so interesting when we experience it only through Ed’s eyes.
Ray wants so little. He’s a rich boy whose wants have all been met, have always been met, will always be met. His only difficulty in life seems to be the suicide of his wife and his father in law’s hatred of him.
Which is why his attempts to be understood read slightly pathetic.
And that, too, is fascinating.
The novel is structured in a way that would demand that we sympathize with Ray, yet Ed is so much more dynamic and interesting and interested.
He has a verve for life. We feel it.
He might be an abysmal person that I would never want to meet, but I’d also never want to spend much time with someone like Ray. A kind and good person bereft of personality and interest.
And yet, when we come to the end of this novel, we’re left in a strange sort of quagmire. It’s a deeply existential book with a maddening perspective. These two men wound round one another, yet with no real resolution between them.
They are trapped with one another, tied to one another, one wanting to be understood, the other wanting only to sever this connection. Yet they are forever tied together through the woman who committed suicide without explanation.
And perhaps this is part of the novel’s strength.
This quiet suicide that happens before the novel begins and remains inexplicable to everyone is a fulcrum. An engine powering all that follows. It helps push Ray into the strange amnesiatic week where he attempts to be not himself. It drives Ed to violence, to hatred, to obscenity.
But at the end of all this, we have another twisting of genre expectation. I suppose I won’t spoil how this all plays out because I do want people to read Highsmith and decide for themselves. But this novel attempts something quite daring and novel. The kind of thing I’ve never really seen before.
And yet it remains far less satisfying than Strangers on a Train or The Price of Salt, in part, by design. The subversion happening in this book is a quieter but more revolutionary one. As a simple reader looking for a mystery yarn to pass the time, it feels perhaps too loose and sloppy. But there’s a philosophical assault here in the quixotic anticlimax that has me returning day after day back to this novel.
Is it her masterpiece?
Well, I cannot say. Maybe at the end of my venture through her career I’ll have a better sense of where to place this one. As it is, I’d place it third of the three I’ve read.
What it offers is less immediate than the others, which colors my opinion. But already, I feel the stirring of a long tail here. While I liked the other novels more, I may not think much of them in the coming months, whereas I may be returning to Those Who Walk Away for years to come.
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