Why is The Talented Mr Ripley set in Italy?

Patricia Highsmith published The Talented Mr Ripley in 1955. It won the Grand Prix de Littérature Policière in France in 1957, launched four sequels, and has been filmed so often that many people know the story without having opened the book. They should open it. The book is colder, stranger and funnier than any of the films.

Why Italy, in the story

The set-up is simple. Tom Ripley is a small-time con man scraping by in New York. Herbert Greenleaf, a shipping magnate, is looking for someone to fetch his son Dickie home, and Tom, exaggerating a slight acquaintance with Dickie into a friendship, gets the job: a paid passage to Mongibello, a village on the Italian coast, to talk Dickie into coming home to the family business.

Tom has no intention of failing at a job with expenses. And once he arrives, Italy stops being a destination and becomes the point:

• It is the life he wants. Dickie's days are sun, sea and doing as he pleases. Tom has never had money or ease; he wants both, and he wants Dickie's.
• It is a stage for reinvention. An American abroad, far from anyone who knows him well, moving between hotels and towns: it is the perfect setting for a man who is good at becoming someone else.
• It is a map. The novel moves from Mongibello to Rome, San Remo and Venice. Each move tightens the plot, and the travel itself becomes part of the suspense.

Italy here is also seen from outside. The Italians are mostly in the background: landladies, police, waiters. The real subject is a group of Americans in Europe, and Tom's hunger to belong among them.

The antihero

Tom Ripley is the reason the book is still read. Highsmith keeps us close to him the whole way, so we see his envy, his calculations and his small social humiliations from the inside. The uncomfortable trick of the novel is that you start, despite everything, to hope he gets away with it. That moral wobble, more than any plot twist, is what readers remember.

We won't spoil what Tom does. The book is a crime novel, and the pleasure is in watching it unfold.

Book versus adaptations

• Purple Noon (Plein Soleil, 1960). René Clément's French film, with Alain Delon as Tom. Sun-drenched and stylish.
• The Talented Mr Ripley (1999). Anthony Minghella's version with Matt Damon, Jude Law and Gwyneth Paltrow. Lush and sunlit, and the version most people picture.
• Ripley (2024). Steven Zaillian's Netflix series with Andrew Scott, in black and white, slower and, to our eyes, closer in mood to the book's chill.

Each adaptation changes things, sometimes a lot. The novel's particular quality, being trapped inside Tom's head, is the hardest thing to film, which is why the book still feels different even if you know the plot. For the general question of which to do first, see book before film.