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“Ripley’s Reviews” is an ongoing series where I will review every book in Patricia Highsmith’s “Ripley” Series, as well as multiple screen adaptations of the novels. I will post my reviews on the first Thursday of the month, and delve into the twisted mind of one Tom Ripley and all the various interpretations that he has come to life within. Up next is the fourth book in the series, “The Boy Who Followed Ripley”.
Book: “The Boy Who Followed Ripley” by Patricia Highsmith
Publishing Info: Lippincott & Crowell, May 1980
Where Did I Get This Book: The library!
Where You Can Get This Book: WorldCat.org | Amazon | Indiebound
Book Description: The Boy Who Followed Ripley, the fourth novel in the Ripley series, is one of Patricia Highsmith’s darkest and most twisted creations.
Tom Ripley meets a young American runaway who has a dark secret that he is desperate to hide. Soon this unlikely pair is drawn into the seamy underworld of Berlin and a shocking kidnapping. In this masterful thriller, Highsmith shatters our perceptions of her most famous creation by letting us glimpse a more compassionate side of this amoral charmer.
Review: Okay look, I’m not going to beat around the bush here. I went into this review series thinking that all of the “Ripley” novels were going to be deeply suspenseful and able to stand the test of time. Patricia Highsmith is a well regarded author, and Tom Ripley is an icon. In the penultimate novel “The Boy Who Followed Ripley”, we get a bit of a dip in quality. Okay, a pretty large dip in quality. As a thriller, it really is stilted. The pacing is totally off. We have Tom Ripley meeting a young American teenager named Billy, who is actually an heir to a fortune named Frank Pierson who fled his home in America because he threw his wheelchair bound father off a cliff. So Tom finding a kindred spirit in this murderous young man goes on a road trip to Berlin, where we vacillate between tedious travel to a weird kidnapping plot that makes the story feel like it’s stopping and starting. Yes, as a thriller “The Boy Who Followed Ripley” didn’t feel all that thrilling or compelling to me.
But as a queer romp with Ripley really REALLY leaning in to the at the very least bisexual side that Highsmith spent so many years denying? GOOD LORD DOES IT WORK.
I am just going to be putting a pretty heavy spoiler warning on this review because we have to talk about so many things. As I mentioned above, for years Patricia Highsmith flat out denied the speculations that Tom Ripley was written as a gay man, in spite of the fact that people were picking up on little signs and coded moments here and there. His obsession with Dickie Greenleaf in the first book is probably the biggest piece of evidence, so much so that both the 1999 adaptation with Matt Damon and the newest Netflix adaptation with Andrew Scott run with it (the latter more than the former, and I will be watching both of these down the line in this series). But in “The Boy Who Followed Ripley” it feels like either Highsmith decided to maybe take these fan theories and speculations for a whirl, or she just decided to troll her readers. Because my goodness is Tom in his experimentation era here. Whether he’s listening to and appreciating Lou Reed’s album “Transformer” (long regarded as an album that really taps into the queerness of Glam Rock), or admitting to himself and others that he doesn’t really crave sex from his wife Heloise, or hanging out in a gay bar in Berlin with Tommy and enjoying the people he is interacting with, or LITERALLY DRESSING IN DRAG TO HELP FOIL THE KIDNAPPING PLOT, this book is REALLY going places that I didn’t expect when it came to Ripley’s sexuality. I’m by no means saying this is some pride parade of a novel, nor am I saying that this book is somehow ahead of its time when it comes to queer characterization. But I will say that getting into Ripley’s head as he’s getting in drag and seeing him muse about how putting on this disguise is freeing, or seeing him look on with what could be longing as Frank finds a fleeting community at a gay bar on the dance floor, was oddly bittersweet, and perhaps some of the most poignant moments for the character yet.
I don’t know why Ripley was so interested in saving Frank. Does he see himself in him? Does he see a potential protege? Is he just fixated again? It’s not clear. It has a lot of questions it leaves unanswered, and then Ripley moves on and will be going into his final story in the next. But for being the weakest in terms of thriller elements, any book that has Tom Ripley fighting kidnappers in drag as a ruse is a okay in my book. There is also a BBC Radio dramatization of this book with Nicholas Hoult as Frank, and I MAY be adding that to my adaptation reviews if I can find it. Anyway, next up is the final book in the series “Ripley Under Water”. I don’t know how Highsmith is going to wrap it up, but there’s no way to top Ripley in drag, if I’m being honest.
Rating 6: As a thriller, this is probably the weakest of the “Ripley” stories yet. BUT AS A QUEER FEVER DREAM?? It’s everything.
Reader’s Advisory:
“The Boy Who Followed Ripley” is included on the Goodreads list “The Vilest Man in Fiction”, and “Drag Queen Fiction”.
The Library Ladies 