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Accentuate the negative: it's time Patricia Highsmith got the respect she deserves in her native Texas. After all, it was the breeding ground of her trademark misanthropy.

Article Excerpt
Nearly a decade after her death, Patricia Highsmith is finally coming into her own in America. W. W. Norton is reissuing her entire body of work, and the dimensions of her oeuvre continue to impress. Highsmith can no longer be thought of as merely a gifted genre writer; her range of interests and accomplishments far surpasses the limitations of a particular type of fiction. Highsmith resisted being branded, preferring to think of herself as a novelist rather than a crime writer. But American publishers wanted labels. Thus her first book, Strangers a Train, was published as a "novel of suspense." And so to avoid another label--"lesbian-bookwriter"--Highsmith used a pseudonym for her second novel, The Price of Salt, a sensational narrative of an affair between two women. It is time to stop categorizing Highsmith in either of these terms. Perhaps Graham Greene, a devoted admirer of her work, put it best when he called her a "poet of apprehension." Indeed she is. To read a Highsmith novel is to suspend one's moral judgments. She irresistibly persuades the reader to side with killers and other moral characters. Her world is perverse and curiously animated: As though they were cartoon objects, guns "look" at their targets (in the forties Highsmith wrote copy for comic books); characters are propelled by unstable psychologies. Much of her fiction reminds me of Flannery was a master of the macabre as well, especially in her short stories. A typical one,...

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