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viridianavs 's review for:
Deep Water
by Patricia Highsmith
4.
This is very good. This is my first Highsmith and holy shit, was she quite a writer.
The book follows the marriage of two people who are very much NOT in love with each other. Not held together by love, the only reason why they don’t get a divorce is that Melinda, the wife, seems to have forced upon the couple an unspoken agreement in which she can take up any men that she likes. So, Vic passively observes his wife waltz around town with a different man every couple of weeks, but a man like Vic can only put up with so much…
Reading this feels like hearing a sociopath’s thoughts, and it’s not even a first-person narrative. Patricia Highsmith’s clever and meticulous writing emulates that of a diary. The lack of connectors between sentences makes it feel like both paragraphs and mind were butchered and then stitched back together. The book is a masterful portrait of marriage, the human psyche, loveless relationships and masks. If someone told me that Gillian Flynn drew inspiration from this book to write Gone Girl I would not be surprised in the least. Both stories hold the same type of enveloping darkness.
I literally just saw that Ben Affleck and Ana de Armas are playing Vic and Melinda in a movie adaptation and I couldn’t have picked a better cast – there’s no one in Hollywood whose face screams borderline sociopathic more than Ben Affleck’s.
This is very good. This is my first Highsmith and holy shit, was she quite a writer.
The book follows the marriage of two people who are very much NOT in love with each other. Not held together by love, the only reason why they don’t get a divorce is that Melinda, the wife, seems to have forced upon the couple an unspoken agreement in which she can take up any men that she likes. So, Vic passively observes his wife waltz around town with a different man every couple of weeks, but a man like Vic can only put up with so much…
Reading this feels like hearing a sociopath’s thoughts, and it’s not even a first-person narrative. Patricia Highsmith’s clever and meticulous writing emulates that of a diary. The lack of connectors between sentences makes it feel like both paragraphs and mind were butchered and then stitched back together. The book is a masterful portrait of marriage, the human psyche, loveless relationships and masks. If someone told me that Gillian Flynn drew inspiration from this book to write Gone Girl I would not be surprised in the least. Both stories hold the same type of enveloping darkness.
I literally just saw that Ben Affleck and Ana de Armas are playing Vic and Melinda in a movie adaptation and I couldn’t have picked a better cast – there’s no one in Hollywood whose face screams borderline sociopathic more than Ben Affleck’s.