It can be difficult to not let envy of other people’s circumstances eat you up. I remember applying for what seemed like a million jobs after I passed the bar exam, seething with jealousy about people who had lawyers for parents who could employ them or get their friends to hire them. I get a little green-eyed about people who don’t have student loans and just like…save money instead of waving goodbye to hundreds of post-tax dollars every month. But I try to remember that for every advantage I long for that someone else has, there are plenty of people out there who look at me and see the many many perks I have gotten without doing anything of my own accord to earn them. Any the ones with the stuff I want, they’ve almost certainly got their own struggles too.

Patricia Highsmith created one of literature’s greatest monsters of desire in her novel The Talented Mr. Ripley. As anyone who’s seen the (very good) movie knows, it follows the titular Tom Ripley, who goes to Italy to seek out Dickie Greenleaf at Dickie’s parents’ request. Tom, who has been quietly running a small mail fraud scheme on seniors for his own amusement while living virtually broke in New York City, is desperate for both the approval of and the funding offered by the Greenleaf family to find their wayward son and bring him home before his mother dies of cancer. It doesn’t take him long at all to track down Dickie once he arrives in the seaside town of Mongibello, but Dickie has no interest in returning to the United States. Tom manages to ingratiate himself with Dickie and his best friend, Marge, feeding stories back to the Greenleafs that he thinks he’s starting to convince Dickie to come back to keep the money going. But he doesn’t just want to be Dickie’s friend, he wants to be Dickie. When the frustrated Greenleafs cut off Tom’s remuneration and Dickie seems to be souring on his company, he’s driven to a desperate act: he murders Dickie, and then assumes his identity.

For a little while, it works: he’s able to play Dickie’s part well enough to cash his checks. But when an acquaintance blunders into the truth, Tom commits another murder and then he’s on the run. He criss-crosses Italy, trying to keep one step ahead of not only the cops, but of Marge and Dickie’s father, who get involved to try to figure out what happened to him. Tom is clever, but is he clever enough to not only get away with one murder, but two?

I’ve watched the movie all the way through a few times and then caught snippets on TV here and there, so I had at least some inkling of the plot going into it. Though it’s a novel of suspense, I found that knowing generally how it would end decreased my enjoyment of it not at all. The plot varies enough that it’s not a carbon copy and there are still moments where I genuinely didn’t know what was going to happen or how/if Tom was going to be able to work himself out of a situation. Highsmith does an excellent job of creating narrative tension, keeping me turning the pages and getting wrapped up in the plot.

In order for the book to really work, though, she has to get you to root for Tom and want to see him get away with it, at least a little. And she does! Like Nabakov’s Humbert Humbert, Tom is a sociopath who acts with regards to his own feelings above all, engaging in monstrous behavior…but also like Humbert, he’s compelling against your better judgment. It would have been easy enough for the character to slip into Patrick Bateman territory and be repulsive, but Highsmith really finds a way to present Tom’s covetousness as less different from and more just a bigger version of the kind everyone feels. This is an excellent, well-written thriller (a genre I don’t always especially enjoy) and I would highly recommend it!