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Deep Water Paperback – May 28, 2012

by Patricia Highsmith (Author)
4.0 4.0 out of 5 stars 1,799 ratings
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Now a major motion picture starring Ben Affleck and Ana de Armas
In Deep Water, set in the quiet, small town of Little Wesley, Patricia Highsmith has created a vicious and suspenseful tale of love gone sour.

Vic and Melinda Van Allen's loveless marriage is held together only by a precarious arrangement whereby, in order to avoid the messiness of divorce, Melinda is allowed to take any number of lovers as long as she does not desert her family. Eventually, Vic can no longer suppress his jealousy and tries to win back his wife by asserting himself through a tall tale of murder―one that soon comes true. In this complex portrayal of a dangerous psychosis emerging in the most unlikely of places, Highsmith examines the chilling reality behind the idyllic facade of American suburban life.

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  1. Print length
    272 pages
  2. Language
    English
  3. Publisher
    W. W. Norton & Company
  4. Publication date
    May 28, 2012
  5. Dimensions
    5.5 x 0.8 x 8.3 inches
  6. ISBN-10
    9780393324556
  7. ISBN-13
    978-0393324556
  8. See all details
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Editorial Reviews

Review

"Deep Water may be Highsmith at her darkest and finest."
― Sarah Weinman, New York Times

"Highsmith is crime fiction's most lethal existentialist…[She] simultaneously makes the subconscious smile and the skin crawl."
― Ed Siegel, Boston Globe

"So good and utterly addictive."
― Megan Abbott, author of You Will Know Me

About the Author

Patricia Highsmith (1921–1995) was the author of more than twenty novels, including Strangers on a Train, The Price of Salt and The Talented Mr. Ripley, as well as numerous short stories.

Product details

  • ASIN ‏ : ‎ 0393324559
  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ W. W. Norton & Company; Reissue edition (May 28, 2012)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Paperback ‏ : ‎ 272 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 9780393324556
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0393324556
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 8.5 ounces
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.5 x 0.8 x 8.3 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.0 4.0 out of 5 stars 1,799 ratings

About the author

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Patricia Highsmith

Patricia Highsmith

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Patricia Highsmith (1921-1995) was the author of more than twenty novels, including Strangers on a Train, The Price of Salt and The Talented Mr. Ripley, as well as numerous short stories.

Customer reviews

4 out of 5 stars
4 out of 5
1,799 global ratings

Top reviews from the United States

H. Schneider
5.0 out of 5 stars Never better motives for becoming a murderer
Reviewed in the United States on March 30, 2006
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Another brilliant story of bottled up emotions, of a protagonist who seems to be free of passion, seemingly has no sexual urges, takes insult with apparent lack of interest, and yet slowly builds up the pressure until he erupts.
Vic, the typically Highsmithian hero, is almost too good to be true, as a father, as a friend, as a neigbour, as an employer, as a professional. And then of course he isn't all that good. We might have guessed.
We have a hard time understanding his patience with his wife. We never quite understand how he can play along for years.
The plot starter is quite original: Vic's wife is outrageously unfaithful, but he is not yet known to be in the least jealous; surprisingly, he starts a rumour that he killed a former lover of his wife's. This is for a time quite effective in scaring away new suitors. Then, in a way unfortunately, the real killer gets caught. Vic has lost some of his status in the neighbourhood, and then he crosses the step from fantasy to reality. In order to rebuild the mystery surrounding him?
One wishes him well, hopes he will get away with it. That is the main driver of considerable suspense in this masterpiece.
One of her best.
14 people found this helpful
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Albert D
4.0 out of 5 stars Murder always
Reviewed in the United States on October 5, 2023
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Patricia Highsmith is a genius with words and a genius storyteller. In this book she creates a protagonist who learns what may happen because of rage unaccepted. It is a genius tale and amazing story.
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Michael G.
3.0 out of 5 stars Characters don't ring true.
Reviewed in the United States on January 31, 2020
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Deep Water is one of Patricia Highsmith's lesser known fictional works. It takes place in small town Massachusetts in the 1950s and stars Vic and Melinda Van Allen. She is a serial adulterer and he chooses to stoically tolerate her many infidelities until one day when he doesn't.
Highsmith's recurring device of illuminating the evil that lurks beneath the surface in seemingly unremarkable individuals is very much on display here. The problem is that Mr. and Mrs. Van Allen are so bizarre to begin with, their personality types are unrecognizable. Many things about the both of them just do not ring true.
Yes, Deep Water is shocking and viscerally disconcerting. So it does engage the reader to that extent. But compared to her many brilliant character driven novels, it comes off as contrived, tedious and ultimately disappointing.
12 people found this helpful
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Pete Morin
5.0 out of 5 stars Beware Poor Formatting
Reviewed in the United States on March 31, 2022
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This is masterful like all of Highsmith's work, but the publisher should be drawn and quartered for butchering the formatting of the kindle version. The entire text is underlined, and there are at least 3 typos a page of such a kind that it is obvious the text was read digitally and not proofed at all.

I had to return it for a refund.
2 people found this helpful
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Debra Hamel
4.0 out of 5 stars The pages turn very fast indeed....
Reviewed in the United States on November 12, 2003
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Thirty-six-year-old Victor Van Allen is being cuckolded, quite blatantly. For a number of years his wife Melinda has paraded a succession of lovers around their small town of Little Wesley, Massachusetts, dragging the men along to the Van Allens' dinner engagements with friends, dancing with them provocatively, entertaining them in night-long debauches in the Van Allens' home. Victor's friends shake their heads or offer him extra desserts at parties--pity food--and they marvel at his reaction to the insult: Victor is a paragon of patience. He allows Melinda her lovers, only wishing that she attracted a higher quality paramour. Still, Victor is not as unconcerned about Melinda's behavior as he appears. He regularly forces himself to stay awake and chaperone his wife's "dates" in their living room rather than please the couple by retiring to his separate bedroom. And, near the beginning of the novel, Victor announces to his wife's most recent flame that he once killed a lover of hers, a certain Malcolm McRae. Victor is lying, but McRae *had* been pummeled to death in his New York apartment, and his murderer had not been identified.

This being a Patricia Highsmith novel, it cannot be a good thing for our put-upon protagonist to confess to a murder he did not commit, and the reader begins at once to wonder how this misstep of Victor's will lead to his undoing. But it is unlikely that readers will correctly anticipate precisely how Victor's story plays itself out.

Patricia Highsmith--the author of, among many other novels, Strangers on a Train and The Talented Mister Ripley--is a master of suspense. Deep Water shares with her other books a certain remarkable slowness. Highsmith's characters unhurriedly attend to the minutiae of their lives. They entertain friends and admire artwork and do the gardening, they take drives and prepare supper. Very often it seems that nothing is happening in one of her books, and yet as the pages turn the reader becomes more and more tense, wondering when precisely the axe will fall--for it certainly will fall. By the end of Deep Water the pages turn very fast indeed.

[Deep Water also shares with some of Highsmith's other novels (Found in the Street) a bizarre vision of parenthood. The Van Allens have a highly disposable daughter, perhaps eight years old, who spends her days in other people's homes, or playing contentedly by herself in her own room. She is sometimes left alone in the house. She is abandoned at the movies when her mother forgets to pick her up. Meanwhile the Van Allens' social calendar is chock full of late-night dinner parties and those uncomfortable threesomes in the living room. Part of this abuse of the daughter has to do with the storyline: Melinda is intended to be a very poor mother. But Victor, the "good" parent, leaves the house for those parties just as often as his wife does.]

Reviewed by Debra Hamel, author of Trying Neaira: The True Story of a Courtesan's Scandalous Life in Ancient Greece
40 people found this helpful
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RRD
5.0 out of 5 stars this is an interesting book with strange characters!
Reviewed in the United States on February 3, 2022
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purchased for my book club, this is a strange read. well written - so much so that I kind of despise both the main characters a third of the way in. it comes highly recommended by my friends, so I will keep going.
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S. Shelton
2.0 out of 5 stars Book arrived in good quality; not a great book.
Reviewed in the United States on July 11, 2022
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Was super excited about this book once I saw the previews for the Netflix movie. Unfortunately, the book is very slow and never gets any better. I do think it was well written as it pertains to describing the town and scenery, it just eluded to many things but never really dug deeper. I do see it was written in the 50’s when they would have left many things out, but there was such potential to never actually get there.
2 people found this helpful
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Jessica
5.0 out of 5 stars Highly stylized, funny and dark
Reviewed in the United States on April 18, 2016
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Much to love about this tale - I wanted to give it 4-stars but had to give up the fifth. Let's settle on 4.5 largely because I had to constantly attribute lack of insight to the era. No friend of Vic (husband) would make excuses for Melinda (wife) today. Children are also given short shrift, put aside after they serve their (small) part as device to show motive or inch plot forward, etc.

I guessed the ending early on, worth .5 of a star as well. That said, the slow poisonous atmosphere, mounting tension and brooding character of Vic are so perfectly rendered that I couldn't wait to get back to the story. His snail collection, meticulous printing and strange bond to the natural and mechanical world held my fascination.

Highly stylized, funny and dark.
8 people found this helpful
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Top reviews from other countries

Miriam B.
5.0 out of 5 stars Wonderful novel
Reviewed in Germany on March 1, 2024
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As someone who generally is not into crime, I decided to give this a shot after it was closely recommended to me. And I'm so happy I read it. I was hooked on page 1. Unknowingly, Patricia Highsmith now takes 21st centurz readers back into a different time, and it's amazing going there with her. Beside the fact that the story and how it unfolds is so wonderfully described - which makes this hopefully just one of many Highsmith books I hope to have read!
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AJH
5.0 out of 5 stars BRILLIANT
Reviewed in Spain on April 26, 2022
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A great read filled with grotesque people. The tricks that PH plays are as always enjoyable whilst remaining disturbing. Very, very good.
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Rebecca Burke
5.0 out of 5 stars Patricia Highsmith at her best.
Reviewed in Canada on September 18, 2017
Verified Purchase
My favourite Patricia Highsmith novel. This is a replacement book for the older one I have that is falling apart. I discovered Patricia Highsmith while in Paris in the early 1980s at Shakespeare & Co. I have most, if not all of her novels.
One person found this helpful
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stuart mcarthur
4.0 out of 5 stars well-paced horror
Reviewed in Australia on May 1, 2022
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I loved the pacing and the unravelling of Vic and the not-quite-right realism of the writing.

Highsmith concentrates on pedestrian details in a disarming writing style, and the unexpectedly clumsy reactions and conversations between the main characters create an unsettling atmosphere that adds to the horror of the events.

The goodness of Vic in his love for his daughter is genuine and contrasts with the fake goodness he constructs for public view. That his repressed anger is justified by his wife’s behaviour also adds to the complexity in the reader of not quite knowing who to side with.

You half want Vic to get away with his crimes, but you’re equally repulsed by them and by his sociopathic arrogance. The ending didn’t make sense on a logical level - his final murder was surprisingly clumsy and convenient for narrative ends, but it somehow matched the not-quite-rightness of the whole story.
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Jill Bretherton
5.0 out of 5 stars This is a truly excellent novel. There is an elegant
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on November 22, 2015
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This is a truly excellent novel. There is an elegant, understated unfolding of the plot. Rather unusually, the tension increases post-murder, rather than in the lead up to the victim's demise, as you will the murderer to watch his step, and his words, in order to evade arrest. Thus, Patricia Highsmith adeptly manipulates the reader into the role of willing accomplice.

Gone Girl has been compared to this novel, but that is an unfair comparison which only benefits Gone Girl. Gone Girl is written in an overwrought style that I cannot admire and the story itself is beyond ridiculous. Deep Water is pure elegant brilliance. Patricia Highsmith is a first class writer who does not have to reach for a far-fetched plot to engage the reader and carry them along in the event of poor writing style. The simplicity of her writing elegantly delivers the authenticity of this plot, driven by real and excellently drawn characters whom we all recognise. The combination of flawlessly simple writing style and the common or garden suburban environment slowly stifling the characters within its confines, is what makes this novel so gripping, stark and disturbing,

I am only sorry that I did not discover this author's work sooner and will definitely be reading 'Strangers on a Train', next.
6 people found this helpful
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