by WILL AITKEN

If you expected the life of Patricia Highsmith (1921–95), American-born author of psychological thrillers like Strangers on a Train and The Talented Mr. Ripley, to be as strange and unsettling as her books, then Beautiful Shadow: A Life of Patricia Highsmith, will not disappoint.

Dipsomaniac and misanthropic, but fond of cats (she claimed to play ping pong with her own late at night, conversing in a private language) and snails (her purse was often full of them, along with a lettuce head for them to munch on), Highsmith had the misfortune of growing up at a time when homosexuality was routinely seen as evil.

Born in Texas, despite her mother's best efforts to abort her by quaffing turpentine, Highsmith was an early lesbian renegade, although she remained closeted all her life. At the time, female homosexuality could be found under the heading ‘Perversions of Affection and Interest' in psychology books. Its negative connotations didn't deter Highsmith from an active sex life while she was still at university. She left behind her what one friend called "a trail of unmade beds."

Throughout her life, affairs were brief and tumultuous. As a gender, she found women weak, inferior. Like many independent women of her era, out of bed she preferred men - although she sometimes fucked them too, even if kissing a man was like "falling into a bucket of oysters."

Despite her inability to sustain love with the sex that attracted her, Highsmith did write, in 1950, what has become a classic of lesbian love, the haunting The Price of Salt (under the nom de plume Claire Morgan, later released under her own name, but retitled Carol), about a young department store clerk's plunge into passion with a mink-clad customer who lives in the suburbs with her husband and child. Clerk and suburban matron flee consumerism and domesticity to go on a cross-country road-trip, anticipating both Kerouac's On the Road and Thelma and Louise. The writing's flat, flareless and oddly menacing, as in all her books, but the ending's happy, as in almost none of them.

Even though her novels and short-story collections received consistently favourable reviews and were frequently made into films (by Alfred Hitchcock, René Clément, Claude Chabrol, Wim Wenders and Anthony Minghella, to name but a few), her books didn't go down well with American readers. Perhaps her understanding and explorations of homegrown evil cut too close to the bone. She didn't think evil was "out there" but rather "in here" - something we're all capable of. In her best novels, psychopaths collide with normal folk and as they rub along together, a murder here, a suicide there, the normal folk are soon revealed as certifiable.

What her biographer Andrew Wilson misses in this otherwise vivid and superbly researched book, and what Highsmith herself may have been unaware of, is how her most memorable character, murderous human chameleon Tom Ripley, has come to stand as an allegorical figure for American imperialism. Ripley is the self-effacing, well-mannered, cheese-smiling American everyman who will, given half a chance, move into your country, your life and your mind, stealing your possessions along with your identity. Ripley is written from the inside - he's our only point of view - so you either identify with him and his casually brutal deeds, or you throw the book across the room. There's no escaping him, Highsmith seems to say, or American hegemony.

The other link that Wilson leaves perhaps too implicit is Highsmith's own identification with evil. He documents the influence of Dostoevsky, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche on her thinking and writing about the nature of evil and details the enduring sadness and desolation of her life, but never quite seems to grasp that she appears to have viewed herself as evil personified, unworthy of love or of much other human affection. Generations of homosexuals of both sexes were brought up to see themselves like this. Highsmith was the same in her suffering, different in that she also illuminated evil in her scary, indelible books.

Beautiful Shadow: A Life of Patricia Highsmith by Andrew Wilson, Bloomsbury, 534pp, hc, $25.95