Patricia Highsmith

Patricia Highsmith is invoked in What Are You Going Through as both a touchstone for psychological crime fiction and a writer who found criminals compelling. The book uses her reported admiration for their vitality and freedom of spirit to frame a contrast: its example of a planned murderer is brutal and without empathy, yet his wish to enter a larger cultural life gives the narrator a limited reason to feel for him.

References and Context

Highsmith is first named as part of the tradition behind a psychological thriller the narrator picks up from a stack of mysteries beside the bed. The book is described as belonging to a noirish, 1970s New York world and as being in the tradition of Highsmith and Simenon; the passage does not identify Highsmith as its author. This reference places her within the narrator’s literary map of crime fiction, rather than supplying biographical information about her.

The thriller’s central man has carefully planned his wife’s murder, but the narrator is less interested in whether the crime will be solved than in what makes the killer compelling or repellent. That distinction prepares the passage’s account of Highsmith’s own stated interest in criminals: the fascination is not simply with a mystery’s solution, but with the character and force of the person who commits the crime.

Criminals and the Limits of Sympathy

The narrator reports that Highsmith admitted liking criminals, whom she found interesting and even admirable for their vitality, freedom of spirit, and refusal to bow down to anyone. The observation describes an attraction to energy and independence, not a claim that criminal acts are morally acceptable. It also sets a demanding standard for the killer in the thriller: despite his capacity for violence, he has the familiar, one-dimensional personality of a psychopath, marked by brutality, sadism, and an absence of conscience or empathy.

One feature complicates that flatness. Still in his twenties, the killer believes he has missed an important part of life and associates what he lacks with the arts. At the novel’s opening, he watches people stream into performances at the new Lincoln Center, envies their participation in cultural life, and imagines acquiring more culture himself. He later sneaks into classes at Columbia University and hopes that reading, music, and art will occupy him after he has got murder out of his system. The narrator does not like him, but feels for this yearning, while suspecting that the virtue may help bring him down. The contrast makes sympathy partial and uneasy: a wish for self-improvement can humanize a violent character without undoing his violence.

Narrative Significance

Highsmith’s brief appearance helps the narrator distinguish a general fascination with criminal vitality from the particular construction of this fictional killer. The man’s cultural aspiration offers a point of emotional access, but it does not turn him into the kind of free-spirited criminal the narrator associates with Highsmith’s interest. Instead, the passage holds two judgments together: the killer is psychologically narrow and morally repellent, yet his awareness of a life beyond his own habits gives him a recognizable lack.

The framing also clarifies the narrator’s priorities as a reader. She is content to stop after the mystery’s first part and has little curiosity about the eventual solution, which she regards as the least exciting part of many crime plots. Highsmith therefore functions less as the subject of a biographical account than as a literary reference through which the book examines what crime fiction can make interesting: not the eventual capture of a murderer, but the troubling mixture of violence, character, and unrealized possibility.