Call number
FIC HIG
Collection
Genres
Publication
W. W. Norton & Company (2012), Edition: Reprint, 344 pages
Description
With the savage humor of Evelyn Waugh and the macabre sensibility of Edgar Allan Poe, Patricia Highsmith brought a distinct twentieth-century acuteness to her prolific body of fiction. In her more than twenty novels, psychopaths lie in wait amid the milieu of the mundane, in the neighbor clipping the hedges or the spouse asleep next to you at night. Now, Norton continues the revival of this noir genius with another of her lost masterpieces: a later work from 1983, People Who Knock on the Door, is a tale about blind faith and the slippery notion of justice that lies beneath the peculiarly American veneer of righteousness. This novel, out of print for years, again attests to Highsmith's reputation as "the poet of apprehension" (Graham Greene).… (more)
Subjects
User reviews
LibraryThing member SomeGuyInVirginia
Patricia Highsmith’s book, one of her last, tells the story of a family pulled into religious fundamentalism through a medical crisis- the youngest son is saved from death through the power of prayer, though it may have been medical intervention, too. The father and youngest son are completely
People seems to me to be written in response to the early Reagan years and the short-lived rise of the religious right in American politics. However, Highsmith’s theme of profound and unyielding religious devotion clashing with its surrounding environments and producing sociopathic behavior is relevant today and has been since 9/11.
Patricia Highsmith ranks up there with Janis Joplin and Goethe as people I’d like to have a beer with.
Show More
given over to religious rule, the eldest son rejects it and the mother seems ambivalent.People seems to me to be written in response to the early Reagan years and the short-lived rise of the religious right in American politics. However, Highsmith’s theme of profound and unyielding religious devotion clashing with its surrounding environments and producing sociopathic behavior is relevant today and has been since 9/11.
Patricia Highsmith ranks up there with Janis Joplin and Goethe as people I’d like to have a beer with.
Show Less
LibraryThing member thorold
Hollywood has rediscovered her since she died, but during most of her lifetime Patricia Highsmith belonged to that select group of American writers who sold more books in France than they did in the USA. The reasons for her repeated rejection by American readers aren't always as obvious as they
The central character of the book is Arthur, a student living with his family in a small town in Indiana, doing well at high school, and looking forward to going off to college on the East Coast. His plans are messed up when his father discovers a new enthusiasm for fundamentalist Christianity.
Highsmith plays her usual trick of bringing a chaotic disturbance into a well-ordered middle-class way of life to destabilise our preconceived ideas about order and morality, and this works very well, leading us gently but firmly into a position where our response to the final crisis will not be the one we expected to have. But the book is undermined by the relative clumsiness of her satirical attack on the evangelicals. Neither she nor any of the sympathetic characters in the book has the least bit of empathy with them and their beliefs - there's no attempt to see inside their heads and we have to take it on trust that they are all either hypocrites or gullible fools. So Highsmith's attacks on them come over more as snobbish prejudice than as the incisive criticism she obviously intended.
Another thing that struck me about the book is that there's a kind of reverse American Graffiti thing going on - it's meant to be set around 1981, and we get occasional mentions of current events to remind us of that, but most of the time Chalmerston, Indiana seems to be locked in something like the Hollywood version of 40s/50s small-town America. Which is presumably largely an accident of Highsmith's biography - when she wrote this book she'd been living in Europe for more than 20 years (and probably hadn't associated with American teenagers for even longer than that); her visit to Indiana to gather local colour was a mere week's stay with some friends in Bloomington. So she must have filled in a lot of the detail from her own experience of earlier times.
Interesting for anyone who wants to chase up Highsmith's career, but really rather a forgettable period piece.
Show More
were with this book, written in response to the rise of Reagan and the religious right in the early eighties, which for quite some time couldn't even find a publisher in America, although it got good reviews in Britain and elsewhere.The central character of the book is Arthur, a student living with his family in a small town in Indiana, doing well at high school, and looking forward to going off to college on the East Coast. His plans are messed up when his father discovers a new enthusiasm for fundamentalist Christianity.
Highsmith plays her usual trick of bringing a chaotic disturbance into a well-ordered middle-class way of life to destabilise our preconceived ideas about order and morality, and this works very well, leading us gently but firmly into a position where our response to the final crisis will not be the one we expected to have. But the book is undermined by the relative clumsiness of her satirical attack on the evangelicals. Neither she nor any of the sympathetic characters in the book has the least bit of empathy with them and their beliefs - there's no attempt to see inside their heads and we have to take it on trust that they are all either hypocrites or gullible fools. So Highsmith's attacks on them come over more as snobbish prejudice than as the incisive criticism she obviously intended.
Another thing that struck me about the book is that there's a kind of reverse American Graffiti thing going on - it's meant to be set around 1981, and we get occasional mentions of current events to remind us of that, but most of the time Chalmerston, Indiana seems to be locked in something like the Hollywood version of 40s/50s small-town America. Which is presumably largely an accident of Highsmith's biography - when she wrote this book she'd been living in Europe for more than 20 years (and probably hadn't associated with American teenagers for even longer than that); her visit to Indiana to gather local colour was a mere week's stay with some friends in Bloomington. So she must have filled in a lot of the detail from her own experience of earlier times.
Interesting for anyone who wants to chase up Highsmith's career, but really rather a forgettable period piece.
Show Less
Pages
344