For our Villains Bracket week, Lit Hub staffers wrote a bit about their favorite villain from our initial group of 64. Here’s Dwyer on Tom Ripley, from The Talented Mr. Ripley, Ripley Under Ground, Ripley’s Game, and more.
I think we could have a pretty lively debate about Tom Ripley’s best performance. Certainly there’s something to be said for his turn as Dickie Greenleaf: his quick adoption of the clothes, the allowance, the real estate, the disenchanted rich boy ennui. I think I prefer Tom as Derwatt, in Ripley Under Ground, in which Tom bucks up a ragtag group of art forgers exploiting their late friend’s death and agrees to visit England in disguise as the artist, giving the occasional press conference and generally dragging the unlucky band deeper and deeper into venality and corruption. That said, Tom’s at his most gleefully villainous, in the traditional sense, in the one novel of the Ripliad where we move fully outside the realm of his perspective and experience: in Ripley’s Game. Here’s where we meet Jonathan Trevanny, an art framer with a terminal diagnosis. Trevanny said something a little snide once to Tom at a party, so Tom, naturally, decides to set up the man in a murder scheme that will occupy his last days on earth and sully his soul. There we’re getting a chance to see Tom more as a Caliban figure, visiting chaos and wrong on an innocent (well, sort of), and seeming to revel in the undoing of order.
Despite all that, I somehow still have trouble seeing Ripley as a pure villain. Tom isn’t charming – that’s a mistaken attribute often hung on him. If he were charming, it would be easier to root against him. He’s simply someone who can pass – who can adopt attributes and the demeanor of one who is correct, who is as he should be. That’s why he more or less fits in wherever he goes. (And oh how he dotes on ‘Belle Ombre’, his house in the French countryside.) Nobody’s under his spell; he’s just sort of…there. Occasionally, or even often, a figure comes through the books who can identify him as an outsider, but most of the time Tom’s just muddling along, when circumstance (the circumstance he has created, alas) demands that he murder someone. To me, that’s a more sympathetic force in the universe, but maybe I’ve just always had a soft spot for the very un-charming Mr. Ripley, the deft mimic, the crafty forger, the dreamer.
And here’s Dwyer’s entire bracket:
