Comments on: In Which, Yet Again, I am Annoyed by a Review

By: Ray Davis

Ray Davis — Tue, 19 Jan 2010 14:02:58 +0000

In other words, I liked it as a reaction to the reaction to the biography, but I can believe it’s unfair as a reaction to the book itself.

By: Ray Davis

Ray Davis — Mon, 18 Jan 2010 17:05:38 +0000

Lethem's notice was my favorite to date but I also agree with this post of yours. Hmm, how can I wriggle around this? Well, for starters, I wear my dislike of literary biography on my sleeve; in fact now that I look it seems to be splattered all over the front of my shirt. So there's that. More particularly, though, it makes me very sad that after decades of trying to get people to stop just paying attention to Highsmith's shelving in the bookstore and to start paying serious attention to Highsmith's writing, now people seem delighted to instead just pay attention to wonderfully awful gossip about Highsmith's personality. There's a very long, still very potent, and very no-win [1] tradition of ignoring the achievements of female writers in favor of tsk-ing at their personal failings (one of the most gruesome examples being when Ezra Pound diagnosed Emily Dickinson as a loony), and I hate hate hate to see it continue in any form. [1] Should all else fail, any successful female writer must at least have neglected her children. What, she didn't even have children? What was wrong with her?

By: simmone

simmone — Sun, 10 Jan 2010 12:30:19 +0000

no see sometimes i think I could read more about highsmith than by her … even though I love her writing (mostly) – there was a bio a few years ago that I seem to remember being really detailed about her financial pressures – she always wrote but it seemed to me that she didn’t start making $ until later and was never properly appreciated in the states because she was too … dark … the book was called Beautiful Shadow – lots of stuff about her sad texas upbringing …

By: Justine

Justine — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 23:33:03 +0000

Alissa: Lethem is, indeed, a very smart, thoughtful guy. Motherless Brooklyn is one of my fave books. We all have our lapses.

By: Alissa

Alissa — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 23:26:40 +0000

There are plenty of genres I don’t like. I know I don’t like them. So, I don’t read them. If someone asked me to write a review of a book in a genre I didn’t enjoy, I would probably turn them down because I am the wrong person for the job. I like Jonathan Lethem’s writing, and I think he’s a pretty smart guy. So, I don’t really understand why he would agree to do this review.

By: Tammee

Tammee — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 23:17:49 +0000

He must have read your comments…lol

washingtonpost.com > Arts & Living > Books

Correction to This Article
This review of Joan Schenkar’s book “The Talented Miss Highsmith: The Secret Life and Serious Art of Patricia Highsmith” incorrectly said that Schenkar knew Highsmith in the latter part of Highsmith’s life, and the review was based on that mistaken assumption, including the reviewer’s wish that Schenkar had written a personal recollection instead of a biography. Schenkar never met Highsmith, nor does the book suggest any acquaintance.

By: Cat Sparks

Cat Sparks — Thu, 07 Jan 2010 04:55:05 +0000

I picked up a copy of Highsmith’s ‘Tales of Natural and Unnatural Catastrophes’ at a newsagents once before embarking upon a tedious coach trip somewhere north. I wasn’t much of a short story reader at the time, but those tales stayed with me for years because they were so darn nasty. Years later I revisited that collection after having dabbled in short story writing myself. The writing style was so unusual. Like she was breaking all the rules, and yet…