There's something sinister at play every time you pick up a Patricia Highsmith novel. Over the course of a career that's included such masterpieces as "The Talented Mr. Ripley" and "The Price of Salt," she has found ways to make the internal struggle into a breathtaking mystery, asking ourselves why we give into certain impulses. That may be why her debut novel, "Strangers on a Train," manages to excel even better at capturing something more perverse than love or espionage. With one of the best hooks for a novel, she captures a novel-length exploration of our fascination with murder. It starts with the simple concept of what would happen if we did it and proceeds to go into painful, wrenching detail about how that secret attacks our ego, wondering if there if the perfect scheme is truly obtainable. Even if it's a murder story that gets to the point quickly, everything that follows is an intense and necessary understanding of crime's ability to hypnotize, drawing even the most innocent person askew. Highsmith knocks it out of the park, making you doubt yourself by the end even as she criticizes the actions. Ther's nothing as delicious as this page-turner, and the perfect way to kick off such an essential career in literature history.
Everything kicks off with one fateful visit on a train, where two strangers share the same space. Anything could happen in this moment, and yet it slowly unravels. What starts as a friendly, sometimes comical conversation about their personal lives eventually dwindles into a wager that has a haunting undertone. One man wants his wife murdered and seeks this stranger to do it for him. It is, as he suggests, the perfect crime. Nobody will suspect that it's him becaue they don't even know each other. At best they've had pages of impersonal chitchat to fall back on. However, the fact that this wager eventually is followed through upon begins to spiral into a series of something even more uncomfortable, more telling of its characters.
Immediately the reader is questioning why these men would so easily give into murder. After all, it's an unforgivable sin that will live in your conscience for the rest of your life. As history goes on, you'll be labeled a murderer. Even if you do it in secret, there is concern that you'll just do it again. It's best not to give into the morbid side of things, and it's the perfect reason that Highsmith makes these characters such compelling messes. What starts as a piece of sadistic joy slowly unravels with characters feeling guilt inside of them, their lives as strangers slowly turning into being familiars. Everything feels paranoid, with the idea of not doing it leading to even more dastardly crimes. For an act that is the equivalent of bullying, it's causing a million ideas to run through their heads, trying to kill this moment.
What is brilliant is not so much the murders themselves, but the feeling of living with the guilt. As the characters try to return to regular life, suddenly the town becomes obsessed with the murder and begin pitching ideas to them, unintentionally prodding them to want to share their secrets. It keeps eating at them until it becomes a whole study of why we're obsessed with dark crimes in the first place. They're secrets that reflect a flaw in the human chromosomes, making one think that one murder can lead to more. What keeps it from being addictive? There's paranoia in Highsmith's writing that keeps you wondering when the next snap is coming, especially as it creates social distancing from their peers and the fantasies start to arise.
What "Strangers on a Train" does best is to achieve a continual dive into humanity's obsession with darkness. There is something perverted in something so permanent and illegal. What would we do to perform murder? More importantly, what would we do one it's happened? There's the fear of being caught alongside the fascination with doing it again. It's a psychological study that works as a page-turning thriller. The text eventually becomes subliminal to the reader, making the fears come as much from your own personal reactions to murder as well as a morbid fascination with vengeance or redemption. Even those who want to punish the murderer will find themselves pulling on negative tendencies, and it shows how much the American system encourages some level of vengeance.
In the pantheon of literature, this deserves to be ranked alongside the best debut novels. It's an insular journey that slowly moves from being an external battle of the conflict to an internal one of morality and guilt. In some ways, it's indicative of the true-crime fascination that would follow in decades to come. Even if this isn't a grisly book otherwise, it manages to convey so much about how small decisions can have major impacts on our lives. There is a need to maintain control at every turn, and when it disappears so does predictability. It starts with peer pressure and becomes a battle for redemption. It's such an amazing page-turner, rich with humor and insight, and the perfect way to argue against accepting the wager of a stranger on a train. It's not worth the road ahead. It can only end badly.
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