Was it love or wasn't it that she felt for Carol? And how absurd it was that she didn't even know. She had heard about girls falling in love, and she knew what kind of people they were and what they looked like. Neither she nor Carol looked like that. Yet the way she felt about Carol passed all the tests for love and fitted all the descriptions.
In an author's afterword to The Price of Salt, which Patricia Highsmith added more than thirty years after its original publication – when she was finally willing to have the book republished under her own name – it is explained that a pivotal scene from the book (in which a young woman is working in a department store and is thunderstruck by the appearance of an older, sophisticated woman) was written on the heels of Highsmith's own encounter while working in just such a department store as a young woman. What I had to learn elsewhere, however, was that Highsmith had been working that job in order to afford therapy designed to cure her of homosexual desire, and that was really the key to unlocking this incredible read: every conversation, interaction – what is said and unsaid – has the absolute ring of truth because it was Highsmith's truth. Naturally, the author invented the plot that follows from that fated meeting, but the emotions, humanity, and longing for connection are recognisable to anyone. Having never read any of Highsmith before, I picked this book up more or less at random, and while I understand that this is unlike her more usual oeuvre, I'd be willing to delve back into her fine writing again any time.
Was life, were human relations like this always, Therese wondered. Never solid ground underfoot. Always like gravel, a little yielding, noisy so the whole world could hear, so one always listened, too, for the loud, harsh step of the intruder's foot.Therese Belivet is a nineteen year old wannabe set designer, living independently in Manhattan, and seeing a man whose company she enjoys, but whose amourous advances she disdains. While working a temporary Christmas job in a department store, Therese is awestruck by a beautiful blonde in a mink coat, and after impulsively sending the woman a postcard, the two strike up a friendship. This woman, Carol, is going through a divorce, and while she seems amused by Therese's youth and devotion, it's unclear what her intentions are for this relationship. When the divorce reaches a nasty place, Carol proposes that the two women go on a road trip across the American Midwest – but while Therese and Carol believe that the open road provides them with the anonymity to be themselves, danger just might be following on their heels.
Told in Therese's first-person perspective, Highsmith does a really fine job of capturing the girl's initial naivete and confusion – she's a strong and independent person, perhaps ahead of her time for 1953, who is devoted to launching her career, and who has real affection for her boyfriend Richard (even if she doesn't understand why even his kisses leave her cold). Therese is often incapable of expressing herself and consistently decides to keep her thoughts to herself, and when she starts interacting with the more sophisticated Carol, the older woman's amused superiority leaves so much unsaid between them that it's aching to be inside Therese's whirling mind. As they proceed along the highway, however, there's a levelling out between the two women, and the Therese who returns to NYC has matured into a fully grown woman – it's a remarkable transformation to witness.
I'd imagine it was Highsmith's own therapy that prompted her to include some Freudian insight to explain Therese's psychology, and it was interesting to later read of all the ways in which Therese was based on Highsmith herself (and to learn of the two women who inspired Carol). Many professional reviewers assert that the road trip these women took must have inspired Nabokov while writing Lolita (I thought the same when they got to the teepee motel); that it inspired Thelma and Louise; I reckon it inspired Hanya Yanagihara and A Little Life. And besides the plot itself, I simply enjoyed Highsmith's writing:
January. It was all things. And it was one thing, like a solid door. Its cold sealed the city in a gray capsule. January was moments, and January was a year. January rained the moments down, and froze them in her memory: the woman she saw peering anxiously by the light of a match at the names in a dark doorway, the man who scribbled a message and handed it to his friend before they parted on the sidewalk, the man who ran a block for a bus and caught it. Every human action seemed to yield a magic. January was a two-faced month, jangling like jester’s bells, crackling like snow crust, pure as any beginning, grim as an old man, mysteriously familiar yet unknown, like a word one can almost but not quite define.And thought that she handled the love scenes well; this is so much more interesting to me than explicit mechanics:
Then Carol slipped her arm under her neck, and all the length of their bodies touched fitting as if something had prearranged it. Happiness was like a green vine spreading through her, stretching fine tendrils, bearing flowers through her flesh. She had a vision of a pale white flower, shimmering as if seen in darkness, or through water. Why did people talk of heaven, she wondered.Back to that author's afterword: Highsmith wrote that after this book's publication, she received many, many letters over the years, thanking her for writing a lesbian love story with a happy ending; apparently, this was the first of its kind:
Prior to this book, homosexuals male and female in American novels had had to pay for their deviation by cutting their wrists, drowning themselves in a swimming pool, or by switching to heterosexuality (so it was stated), or by collapsing – alone and miserable and shunned – into a depression equal to hell.So, there's value in that, value in the writing, and value in the story itself. On every level, I'm pleased to have found this book.
