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3.0 out of 5 stars
Good, but not great Highsmith, 5 Jul 2003
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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