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Found in the Street (Hardcover)

by Patricia Highsmith (Author)
3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)

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Product details

  • Hardcover: 288 pages
  • Publisher: William Heinemann Ltd; hardcover edition (7 April 1986)
  • Language English
  • ISBN-10: 043433524X
  • ISBN-13: 978-0434335244
  • Product Dimensions: 21.6 x 14 x 1.8 cm
  • Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
  • Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 3,352,646 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Review

Highsmith (Strangers on a Train), a pioneer of the psychopathology thriller, is to some extent responsible for the high level of craft at work in that genre today. So it's a bit ironic that her new novel - an initially intriguing but ultimately thin and unconvincing study in sexual obsession - is made disappointing by contrast with the powerful work of such second-generation practitioners as Ruth Rendell. Set in NYC's Greenwich Village/Soho, the book focuses on two men's very different preoccupations with beautiful, angelically blond Elsie, a would-be model/actress newly arrived in the city and working as a Village waitress. Middle-aged security guard Ralph Linderman - deserted by his wife, sexually repressed, wildly moralistic yet quirkily anti-religious - sees Elsie as the embodiment of sweet innocence; he follows her around, warning her against big-city sin. Meanwhile, Elsie meets Jack and Natalia Sutherland, a glamorous 30-ish couple (he's an artist, she's an art dealer) who introduce the young stunner to their glitzy friends, helping her get started as a model; Jack is drawn to Elsie in a romantic, esthetic, non-sexual way, but he suspects that Natalia is sliding into an affair with Elsie (whose sex-life is primarily lesbian). Ralph, misunderstanding Jack's interest in Elsie, is soon eavesdropping, haranguing, and harassing. But the violence here, when it eventually comes, emerges arbitrarily from left. field, leaving the two men to feud pointlessly in the anticlimactic final chapters. The portrait of the Sutherland marriage, with trendy art-world backgrounds, is effectively ambiguous and creepily convincing. Crazy coot Ralph, however, is an overly familiar psycho, type, especially in comparison to Rendell's deranged loners. And despite the long, slow buildup, there's no payoff. Sporadically engrossing, then, but largely unsatisfying. (Kirkus Reviews)

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3.0 out of 5 stars (2 customer reviews)
 
 
 
 
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3.0 out of 5 stars Good, but not great Highsmith, 4 July 2003
By BiblioPhil (Essex United Kingdom) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Found in the Street (Paperback)
Patricia Highsmith excelled in the psychological crime novel in a way that few, if any, others matched. Her strength was always to depict those marginalised by society in some way, often a moral distancing from the conventional. Famous for her Ripley novels, she also wrote some exceptional non-series crime novels such as the excellent Deep Water.

‘Found in the Streets’ is not, sadly, a crime novel. There is a crime in it, certainly, but it occurs very late in the text and even then is almost incidental to the main narrative. That’s a pity because Highsmith was in her element describing either the suffering of a character drawn into violence or the amoral attitude of a criminal and we get neither of these things in this book. The novel suffers further by being split between two points of view; that of the upstanding Jack Sutherland and that of the morally evangelical Ralph Linderman. As such, the whole becomes a little diluted.

There is a reason for this splitting of perspectives, but it’s not apparent for at least half of the novel. What she does, and does incredibly well, is to draw the characters closer and closer together so that, in many ways, they become mirror images of each other; separated by a shorter and shorter distance while, simultaneously, becoming more polarised in their attitudes. The problem with this split perspective is that for a lot of the novel we have to plough through descriptions of the uninteresting domesticity of Jack Sutherland’s life. Far more successful is the depiction of Linderman’s increasingly vehement moral rectitude. He’s a great character; never quite slipping into the cliché of the morally zealous preacher-type.

Inevitably, therefore, the best parts of this novel are when the two meet or when Highsmith recounts incidents experienced by both but in ways that allow us to see each point of view. This happens enough to make the book interesting but never enough to make it compelling.

Overall, a good novel but not a good Highsmith novel and certainly not the kind of crime novel that Highsmith fans may be expecting.

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3.0 out of 5 stars Not quite up to snuff, 11 Sep 1999
By A Customer
This review is from: Found in the Street (Mass Market Paperback)
Any Patricia Highsmith is better than none, but Found In The Street makes less than a meal. The only character who might compel our interest is the unfortunate objet trouvee, but Highsmith's choice of narrative prevents us from inhabiting her. The action is seen through the eyes of Jack, a dreary cuckold whose cathartic confrontation is with a semi-psychotic security guard. If you're used to a steady diet of Highsmith at her finest (e.g., The Talented Mr. Ripley, A Dog's Ransom), this book will disappoint. If you've been reading John Grisham, on the other hand, you might feel as if you've discovered the last honest bistro in Paris.
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