Joan Schenkar (1952–2021)

how many hours of my life was i willing to spend with this milk-chugging, antisocial, misogynistic snail pervert sociopath....the answer, dear reader, was too many. if you've wanted to be regaled with accounts of the world's worst lover, most miserable dinner companion, and yeah ok briliant master of suspense you're gonna blow your top when u see just how....many....horrible anecdotes there are. s/o to schenkar who clearly about 50 pages into the book--after spending god knows how long looking into highsmith's chilling interior life--is so sick of her subject she can barely contain herself w/ cutty asides. good biographer? bad biographer? it seems no1 sld have been given the task.

some "highlights" (lowlights???): chilling list in which highsmith ranked her lovers, strange topless photo of highsmith in the glossy pics section (WHY???), exhaustingly detailed accounts of highsmith's bigotry including how she wrote a 12pg radio play rife w/ naziism, anecdote about highsmith inviting her girlfriend over after declaring her love for another woman in writing on all of the mirrors in lipstick, an account of highsmith possibly poisoning a man she didn't like at a dinner party, diary entries about watching her snails make love, anecdotes about the things that made highsmith laugh which were mostly death camps or having to do with debilitating physical/mental ailments

i left this book knowing one thing for certain--patricia highsmith's novels operate at the margins of terror & insanity solely because she herself was crafted in the darkest depths of hell. also i would not put murder past this woman.… (mais)

Patricia Highsmith is best known for her "Ripliad" -- five novels featuring an engaging murderer, Tom Ripley. This criminally attractive man is the enemy of all things conventional, as was his creator.

Moments before her death, Highsmith urged a visiting friend to leave, repeating, "Don't stay, don't stay." Highsmith wanted nothing more than to die alone, according to her biographer, who concludes, "Everything human was alien to her."

Highsmith, a native Texan, was born restless, her mother said. The novelist kept moving to new venues all over Europe, acquiring and discarding female lovers and denouncing all of them. They were poor substitutes for the mother she loved and hated.

This mother fixation was just one of the Highsmith passions that provoke biographer Joan Schenkar to eschew a chronological narrative. Instead, the chapters in "The Talented Miss Highsmith" (St. Martin's Press, $35) are organized around Highsmith's obsessions.

The result of this unorthodox approach is an intricate, novel-like structure that suits Schenkar's own wit. Highsmith's mother, Mary, makes several entertaining entrances -- for example, arriving in London to see her daughter "with rather less warning than the Blitz."

"Miss Highsmith" is full of wonderfully realized scenes, like the opening chapter describing with mesmerizing, miraculous detail exactly how Highsmith composed her work. She gripped her "favorite Parker fountain pen, hunched her shoulders over her roll-top desk -- her oddly jointed arms and enormous hands were long enough to reach the back of the roll while she was still seated."

Highsmith's love life is described with loving specificity garnered from sources who do not wish to be identified by their real names.

"In the delicate balance of competing truths that biography is always on the verge of upsetting, both the living and dead deserve a little protection from each other," Schenkar writes.

This panoply of lovers is new material not to be found in other books, which also failed to unearth Highsmith's surprising seven-year career writing for comic books.

For those who want the straight dope, there is a substantial appendix titled "Just the Facts." But Schenkar is at pains to reiterate that Highsmith did not develop over time; indeed, the biographer notes that Highsmith "forged chronologies to give order to her life, altering the record of her life and the purport of her writing to do so."

You don't have to buy Schenkar's thesis. In "Beautiful Shadow," Andrew Wilson produced a rather good chronological biography of Highsmith.

Nevertheless, Schenkar's methods and deep research into Highsmith's deceptive practices have yielded one of the year's best literary lives, which is also a bracing rebuke to the usual way we read biography.… (mais)