Minderquist had been going to indulge in a little fantasy about mermaids on the golf course, but he noticed a murmur among the assembled, as if the journalists were consulting one another. Mermaids who graced the links and flipped their tails to send the balls to a more convenient position for the golfer, Minderquist had been going to say, but suddenly three people put questions to him at once.
In the title story of Mermaids on the Golf Course, quoted above, an advisor to the President of the United States shielded his boss' body during an assassination attempt – taking a bullet to the brain and apparently removing the self-control mechanisms that stopped him from acting out perverse impulses. And I can see why that became the title story of this collection: throughout, we see characters acting on impulses that most of us have in control (if we have them at all) – impulses to harm ourselves and others, to be unfaithful partners, to literally and figuratively tear our houses down around ourselves. Patrica Highsmith is most famous for creating the character of (the talented) Mr. Ripley, and while most of us aren't that brand of sociopath, the characters she writes into these short stories are just familiar enough to make the reader uncomfortable; to want to scan oneself and one's familiars for these proper mechanisms of control. Ultimately, these stories seemed a bit repetitive read all at once, but for a short collection, they entertainingly whiled away the hours.
Repetitive these stories are: several characters try to kill themselves (jumping into a gorge, taking pills, stepping in front of a taxi), and in addition to poor Minderquist up there and his lobotomy-by-bullet, characters are forever suffering head injuries and coming back to swimmy consciousness:
He woke up to a soft roar of voices that sounded like a sea, blinked his eyes and recognized the faces bending over him...Then suddenly Andrew was on the ridged floor. He had almost fainted, had lost his balance, and now the two policemen were hauling him back on to bench...When Ralph was next aware of consciousness, or of thought, he seemed to be floating, weightless, horizontal perhaps, and on his back...Odile woke to find herself lying on her back in a bed, and she felt pain all along the right side of her head and face. She lifted her right hand, and her fingertips encountered thick bandages that extended under her chin.
There's not a lot of dialogue in these stories, so we're stuck in the mind of a father who finds his son with Down's syndrome “monstrous”, in the mind of a young photographer who milks his “lucky photo” of a rape victim for fame and fortune, in the mind of a man who is secretly pleased when his wife has a heart attack; these are not easy to like characters. And as with fainting or getting knocked on one's head, these stories are mostly about how easy it is to lose control – to quickly veer from loving to despising one's partner; to kill a man impulsively; to walk towards rejection and turn away from happiness. Often, I couldn't understand these characters' motivations – and especially their reversals against self-interest – but Highsmith's philosophy seems to be summed up in this quote from the second last story, The Cruelest Month:
Life was nothing but trying for something, followed by disappointment, and people kept on moving, doing what they had to do, serving – what? And whom?
When life is pretty much meaningless, why should meaning be ascribed to people's actions? Fun stuff. There's nothing really deep here, and the repetition of themes were probably of more interest to Highsmith to write than for me to read, so I'm going with three stars.
