Nothing That Meets the Eye: The Uncollected Stories of Patricia Highsmith

Rating:
Summary: Magnificent!
Review: I am usually not a short story fan, but I can't tell you how much I enjoyed this collection. Highsmith is such a fabulous writer that you are completely drawn into her stories and can't wait to turn the page. Some of her stories in previous collections haven't been my cup of tea. But in this collection, Highsmith shows herself as a writer's writer and gives readers a wonderful gift of perfectly crafted stories that will stay with you long after you close the cover.

Rating:
Summary: Really high on Highsmith
Review: She's baaack! A second anthology of Patricia Highsmith's short fiction, this time featuring stories that have not been published until now.

Unlike the first collection of her short fiction (where many of the stories struck me as mere character sketches) the contents of "Nothing That Meets the Eye" are all fully developed short stories. One of my favorites features the subtle yet obvious menace of a stranger with candy, a very, to paraphrase the story's title, "Nice Sort of Man." The one story that fails to impress in the collection is "The Born Failure." It features a downtrodden, Job-like little man who lurches from one disappointment to the next. The story ends in an oddly sappy upbeat "It's a Wonderful Life" way, as if Highsmith suddenly got bored with cataloguing this character's misfortunes and wanted him off her hands. Interestingly enough, she didn't kill off the Failure. Possibly because for such a loser death might have seemed a kindness.

An added bonus is Paul Ingendaay's biographical essay, which follows the collected short stories. It gives a greater insight into Highsmith's literary process, touches on her lesbianism, and its probable influences on her body of work. (I'd always thought it odd that, in a wild divergence from her more mainstream suspense fiction, Highsmith had written the lesbian-themed novel, The Price of Salt, under the name of Claire Morgan.) Even more intriguing is the fact that Highsmith, apparently a meticulous literary craftsman, left behind a treasure trove of workbooks, notebooks, journals, as well as typescripts of drafts of published and unpublished works. Hopefully one day these literary artifacts will also find their way into print.