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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Words to the Wise, 14 Mar 2006
Judging from the quotes on the back, Edith's Diary has much praise to live up to: "With Edith's Diary, Patricia Highsmith has produced a masterpiece" ... "As original, as funny, as cleverly written and as moving as any novel I have read since I started reviewing" ... "A work of extraordinary force and feeling ... her strongest, her most imaginative and by far her most substantial novel."The setting at the outset is not dissimilar to something we might encounter in Richard Yates: in the 1950s a New York couple, Edith and Brett Howland, with a young son decide to escape the rat race and downsize to the country, for a better way of living. They want to produce a local newspaper which will win everyone over to their left-of-centre political stance. There's no denying, however, that Highsmith lacks Yates's masterful prose: which is not to say that there's anything wrong with her writing on a sentence-by-sentence level; it's just that it's more serviceable than beautiful. The start is subtle and slow, but even by a quarter of the way in, things are starting to go seriously wrong for Edith, though she seems strangely reluctant to tell her diary this, even though she's the only one (apart from us) reading it. Highsmith excels in creating a downward pull that drags you through the chapters, knowing that nothing good awaits you there. And Edith's Diary progresses satisfyingly, if not surprisingly, and with a good helping of understated tragedy. For a portrait of descent into mental illness - paralleled by other characters' descents into decrepitude and death, and into delinquency and alcoholism - it's as gripping as it is grim. When Edith, less than halfway through the book, haltingly admits to her husband "I have the feeling sometimes that something's - sort of cracking in me," it carries as much weight and force as Willy Loman declaring that he feels a little temporary about himself, or Ishiguro's Mr Stevens telling us "Indeed - why should I not admit it? - at that moment, my heart was breaking." Yet Edith's descent is subtle and slow, even toward the end, when we begin to see things from other people's points of view, and her diary entries are heartbreaking. Another high then from a writer who, along with Yates, must be one of the literary world's leading lowsmiths.
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by Patricia Highsmith
by P Highsmith
by Patricia Highsmith
by Patricia Highsmith
by Patricia Highsmith
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