Product Description

When a troubled young runaway arrives on Tom Ripley's French estate, he is drawn into a world he thought he'd left behind, the seedy underworld of Berlin and kidnapping plots, lies and deception. Ripley becomes the boy's protector as a friendship develops between the young man with a guilty conscience and the older one with no conscience at all.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #63542 in Books
• Published on: 2001-02-01
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 304 pages

About the Author
Patricia Highsmith was born in Fort Worth, Texas in 1921 but moved to New York when she was six. In her senior year she edited the college magazine, having decided to become a writer at the age of sixteen. Her first novel Strangers on a Train was made into a famous film by Alfred Hitchcock in 1951. Patricia Highsmith died in Locarno, Switzerland in 1995. Her last novel Small g: A Summer Idyll was published posthumously just over a month later

Customer Reviews

Can Ripley Be Successfully Emulated by Others?
The Boy Who Followed Ripley will either be your favorite Ripley book or it will be a large disappointment.

If you have not read any Ripley books, I suggest that you start with The Talented Mr. Ripley instead.

Those who will be disappointed by this book will be people who wanted a book just like one of the first three in the series. Those who will be very pleased are those who want to think through the implications of Ripley's character and who he is becoming. I have graded the book as an average of the two likely reactions.

We see a new side of Ripley in this book. He takes a troubled American teen under his wing and mentors him in the way that a friendly uncle or much older brother might. In the process, Ripley reveals more of himself to the boy than to anyone else. Ripley also ends up musing and seeing his own marriage and history in a new light as he understands the boy's problems.

I'm sorry that I cannot go into the story in more detail. To do so would simply spoil the plot development for you.

If you like character development with long stretches of little plot development, this book will be a lot of fun. If you crave the constant action of The Talented Mr. Ripley, this book will drag slowly in long sections for you.

Unless you are ambivalent about the Tom Ripley character, I do suggest that you read the book . . . even if it won't be your favorite.

very dark, very subtle
The Ripley books have become a minor compulsion for me (WHEN will they re-print Ripley Under Water?). Highsmith's prose is clipped neatly as ever and although there is less physical action in this book, there is a lot more going on psychologically. This is not to the work's detriment - Highsmith's style is better suited to subtle proddings of psyches than it is to 'crash!kerpow!' comic book storylines.

I think that the darker undertones of the boy's relationship with Tom are set off starkly agaisnt the ordinariness of every day life that goes on around them. The precise nature of their mutual attraction is simply never set out starkly ...

I think that Highsmith may have used this book to add yet more depth and character to her anti-hero - strangely though the more she tells us about him, the more enigmatic he becomes.

A very subtle, excellent work.

the man without conscience
As good as 'Ripley Under Ground', and better than 'Ripley's Game'. Nowhere near as good as Highsmith's real classics - 'Strangers on a Train', 'Carol', or 'The Cry of the Owl', all of which are required reading. However, this is still an interesting read for fans of Thomas Ripley, and reawakens some themes from the original 'Talented Mr . . .' It's the icy coldness of Highsmith's 1950s prose that intrigues me, but this novel appeals in a different way, as we see Ripley thaw and unfreeze as 'the boy's' hero-worship of him hits home. Tom begins to relive his attraction to and his own obsessive response to the murder of Dickie Greenleaf. . . Hooray to Vintage for reprinting Highsmith's back catalogue - and hopefully we won't have to wait too long for 'Ripley Under Water'.