Patricia Highsmith
(Bloomsbury)
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Synopsis
Therese first glimpses Carol in the New York department store where she
is working as a sales assistant. Carol is choosing a present for her daughter;
she looks preoccupied, exuding an aura of elegance as perfect as a secret.
Standing ther at the counter, Therese is wholly unprepared for the first
shock of love.
First published under a psuedonym in 1952, Carol is a love story told
with compelling wit and eroticism, and consummate tenderness.
Biography
Patricia
Highsmith was born in Fort Worth, Texas, in 1921. Her first novel, Strangers
on a Train, was made into a film by Alfred Hitchcock in 1951. The Talented
Mr Ripley, published in 1955, was awarded the Edgar Allan Poe Scroll by
the Mystery Writers of America and introduced the anti-hero Tom Ripley,
who was to appear in several of her later crime novels. Patricia Highsmith
spent much of her life in England, France and Switzerland. She died in
Locarno, Switzerland, in February 1995. Her last novel, Small g: A Summer
Idyll, was published posthumously just over a month later.
Contributors Testimonials
I
first read Carol as a teenager, drawn to the Edward Hopper portrait on
the cover. I always judge a book by its cover. It was a painting of two
women framed by the window of an otherwise empty late night diner: appropriate
as Carol uttterly transports the reader to a very 1950s New York. It is
told from the point of view of Therese, an articulate but touchingly naive
young woman who has taken a temporary job in a department store at Christmas
time, and who finds with a shock that she has locked eyes with a customer.
Carol exquisitely describes the frustrating thrill of falling in love,
set in a climate with few sexual or cultural reference points. Highsmith
herself revealed in the author’s notes that when working as a Salesgirl
she once observed a sophisticated female customer puase to test the suppleness
of a pair of leather gloves on display. Carol is the story of what she
imagined could happen next.
Sadie Lee
I’m
a great admirer of Patricia Highsmith’s fiction – particularly
the wonderfully amoral Ripley novels. But Highsmith also wrote one of
the best-ever lesbian romances: The Price of Salt (subsequently reissued
as Carol). First published under a pseudonym in 1952, this cool, understated
novel was ground-breakingly positive in its depiction of lesbian love.
Its plot has a restless young girl being seduced from her place behind
the toy counter of a New York department store by a sexy society woman
with a green convertible and a pearl-handled gun... What more could you
ask for?
Sarah Waters
There
have been countless blooming-girl/older-woman love stories. There will
no doubt be many more to come, as long as young women fall in love with
seemingly unattainable older women. (And older women continue to indulge
them.) The tortured passion, the truths spoken and unspoken, the semi-hysterical
desire compounded with a sense of crossing some unknown barrier from permissible
love into that which dares-not-speak-its-name … and then there’s
Carol. First published in 1952 as The Price of Salt, under the pseudonym
Claire Morgan, Highsmith’s novel has all the hallmarks of the first-lesbian-love-story
- and it’s beautifully written. Crafted. Cool. Spare. Clean. It
has the edginess of her suspense novels, the openness of a coming of age
tale, and the strength of true passion. It also has the sadness of its
time, the mother and child story, the court case counter-plot, are a salutary
reminder for those who now think being gay is merely all about who you
shag and/or an easy route to some cheap publicity, not also about living
in the world, or being out, or taking a stand. (Or being grateful to those
who came before us and made our present comparative freedoms seem so ordinary.)
What’s more, Highsmith gives the novel a happy ending, her characters
have the possibility of a positive future. Our heroine does not kill herself,
marry in haste, or go mad. For this alone, writing in 1949, Highsmith
would deserve praise. Coupled with a easy style and elegant prose, her
work clearly stands out, in both this category, and any other.
Carol is simply a very good novel. I’m not sure if this makes it
a good queer novel, the word is so loaded and so subjective, the judging
criteria must surely change with every reader’s definition of the
term ‘queer’. (I don’t, for example, think my own book
in this selection is my ‘queerest’ novel – lesbian-est
perhaps, but I’d say Singling Out the Couples is more queer than
Calendar Girl.) And maybe Highsmith wouldn’t have wanted to be part
of a ‘queer selection’ anyway – in the 1989 Afterword
to Carol, she explains that the novel (as The Price of Salt) was published
under a pseudonym to accord with her publisher’s desire to have
her known only as a ‘suspense’ novelist. She writes: “I
like to avoid labels. It is American publishers who love them.”
Postscript : In 1988 I was working at Bloomsbury as a general dogsbody,
occasionally sitting on the reception desk at lunchtime, while half the
office were down the road at the Groucho. Back then Bob Geldof would occasionally
rush into the building, shout “Tell Nigel I’m here!”
then charge up the stairs two at a time without waiting for an answer,
while Terence Stamp on the other hand, would stand at the desk, quietly
lean over and say “Terence Stamp for Liz?” Of course I knew
who both men were, neither needed to say their name, but the one who did
earned a good deal more respect from ‘just the receptionist’
than the other. And there was Patricia Highsmith. A slight, older woman,
with a faint North American accent, who smiled crookedly and called herself
Pat. And was charming. A woman who, at the time, had a score of acclaimed
novels under her belt, whose first novel had become a successful Hitchcock
film, whose pseudonymous novel (later published as Carol) sold nearly
a million back in 1952 when she was only 31. I hadn’t read a thing
she’d written, she was as important – and unimportant –
as any of the other writers, but her behaviour made me want to read her.
A woman who was nice to the girl on the desk.
Stella Duffy
Originally
titled The Price of Salt, this is a wonderfully written, evocative ‘road
movie’ novel that tells the story of two women, one married, one
not, who fall in love and find themselves pursued across America by a
private detective acting for the husband, who wants sole custody of their
child. Set in the 1950s, it is without self-pity or melodrama. It’s
a model of its kind.
Jeanette Winterson