A Girl like Phyl | The Broad Range of Styles and Techniques in Highsmith's Stories
In the following review, Lasdun comments on the broad range of styles and techniques, the ‘‘astounding’’ variety of characters and the dark themes Highsmith employs in her short stories.
Most readers know Patricia Highsmith primarily as the creator of the affable sociopath Tom Ripley. But one of the exhilarating effects of reading Highsmith’s stories—the 700-page Selected Stories that came out last year and now another 400-plus pages of ‘‘uncollected’’ ones in Nothing That Meets the Eye—is the greatly enlarged sense of her range and energy as a writer that they impart. The sheer variety of beings (human and otherwise) whose skin she slips in and out of from story to story is astounding—a Mexican street hustler one moment, a pair of quarrelsome...
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