My review of Carol, by Patricia Highsmith

Carol

by Patricia Highsmith

My rating: 5 out of 5 stars

Much has been written about this novel's background and author in recent times, most notably since the release of director Todd Haynes' exquisite screen adaptation. Out of nowhere emerged a storm of profiteering posthumous Patricia Highsmith biographers, echoed or contradicted by as many self-proclaimed lay aficionados and of course proponents of same-sex marriage. 

Their politically timely discourse catapulted her already popular enough novel to a mainstream status she never dreamt of it attaining (making money she will never see), while making claims she can never confirm or deny concerning her literary impetus. Whilst it seems a waste of words recapping all of that here, I wholeheartedly concede that this lesbian love story's history is as captivating as the narrative itself. 

If, like me, you value style over substance, then Carol will grab you by the throat, though the substance is present too, in bucket loads. The tension of its pace combined with its evocative imagery I found beguiling.

The premise is simple and insightful: 

Two women fall in love in McCarthyism era America, when same-sex love is deemed a sickness and its fulfilment anti-American. 

The plot unfolds thus:

Therese, a lonesome young theatre set design aspirant, is in Manhattan chasing a career break. She neither loves, nor likes sleeping with, her boyfriend, Richard. One tedious day at a department store she works at, Therese becomes infatuated by a dazzling female customer in her thirties. The woman, Carol, gives Therese her address for purchase delivery. 

Therese sends Carol a Christmas card. Carol, going through a divorce, responds. They initiate a liaison which, for Therese, becomes an obsession which the jealous Richard derides as a 'schoolgirl crush'. But Therese knows she feels love.

Carol's husband, Harge, grows suspicious of Therese, who he finds at Carol's New Jersey home (Carol having earlier told Harge of her brief fling with her best girlfriend, Abby). Harge takes custody of his and Carol's daughter Rindy, controlling Carol's parental access as the divorce proceeds. 

To escape the unpleasantness, Carol takes Therese on a road trip out West, while they explore their mutual passion.

They discover a private investigator is tailing them, hired by Harge to gather sordid divorce evidence. They find he had bugged the first hotel room they made love in. Carol confronts him, demanding he hand over any evidence against her. She bribes him for some recordings, but he warns he has sent others to Harge. 

Aware she will lose custody of Rindy if she stays now with Therese, Carol leaves Therese behind, returning to New York to fight for Rindy's custody. However, evidence of Carol's lesbian infidelity is so solid she surrenders, preventing an airing in court. She grants Harge full custody of Rindy, settling for limited parental access herself.

Unaware of this outcome, the broken and disillusioned Therese returns to NYC to begin anew. Soon approached again by Carol, they meet, but the once-bitten Therese snubs Carol's offer of cohabitation. They head towards separate evening engagements. 

After an awkward flirtation at a party that night, Therese backtracks to find a consequently rapturous Carol. They presumably live happily ever after. 

The End.

So, conceptually not so unlike JD Salinger's book The Catcher in the Rye (published a year before in 1951), being largely a young protagonist's road journey juxtaposed against their internal voyage of self-discovery. Salinger's, of course, is narrated in the first person, concerns only the one central character/narrator and is steered by no same-sex romance. Carol is in the third person, from besotted protagonist Therese's point of view. 

Patricia Highsmith draws from one of her most intense affairs, with wealthy American socialite Virginia Kent Catherwood, who she had met in NYC in 1944. This is therefore more than semi-autobiographical, with largely just fictionalised name keys salvaging the piece from being a blatant memoir of, for its day, potentially libellous scope. 

In the book's telling 'Afterword', Highsmith discloses her 1948 inspiration for the novel. She, like the story's protagonist Therese, worked fleetingly as a casual 'Christmas rush' doll salesgirl in a major Manhattan department store's toy section (Bloomingdales, in Highsmith's real-life case). 

One morning an elegant, enigmatic looking blonde woman in a fur coat drifted towards the doll counter, uncertain whether to buy a doll or something else. Highsmith helped and served her, taking her name and address for delivery to an adjacent state. After the woman departed, Highsmith felt: 

'... swimmy in the head near to fainting, yet at the same time uplifted, as if I had seen a vision.'

 On arriving home to her apartment that night Highsmith who, like Theresa, lived alone, wrote out: 

' ... an idea, a plot, a story about the blondish and elegant woman in the fur coat. I wrote some eight pages in longhand in my then current notebook or cahier. This was the entire story of The Price of Salt, as Carol was then called. It flowed from my pen as if from nowhere – beginning, middle and end. It took me about two hours, perhaps less.'

The next morning Highsmith developed chickenpox and fell into a fever, concluding that one of the toy department's many visiting children at the store had infected her. Prioritising her health over all else, she handed in her notice at the store and shelved writing out The Price of Salt. 

Several years later, established as a Harper & Bros 'suspense writer' with Strangers on a Train (1950), Highsmith attained wider recognition when Alfred Hitchcock made a 1950 film of it. Sensing this had cemented her 'suspense writer' categorisation, she decided it best to pursue publication of The Price of Salt under a nom de plume, as she may never again write a lesbian romance and so wished to avoid being re-labelled such. 

(She includes no mention of lacking the courage to own a lesbian love story in such a closeted era, which I find less than frank. After all, openly lesbian authors were not unheard of, considering the great author Gertrude Stein et al, but again this was an era arguably even more staunchly right wing than even Stein's heyday, a kind of conservative blowback period). 

Having spent ten months developing this novel from her original Christmas 1948 outline notes, she was perturbed at being obliged to switch publishers when Harpers & Bros rejected it (for obvious generation-related reasons, one surmises, which again Highsmith shies from spelling out). 

She notes that it received respectable initial reviews as a hardcover piece, but that its real success followed a year later as a paperback which sold nearly a million copies. Fan letters, via the paperback house to 'Clare Morgan', poured in twice weekly for months, trickling in for years. The appeal, she notes, was that it had a happy ending for its two main characters, in an era when previous such same-sex attracted characters: 

'... 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.' 

In this sense this was a groundbreaking novel of its kind. 

Yet not unit its 1990 Bloomsbury Books rerelease (as Carol) did Highsmith publicly break her alias and acknowledge authorship. Like so many latter day LGBTQI 'role models', she had waited until post sexual revolution to come out, which in some ways undermines her 'bravery'. 

The rest, as they say is history. In that more gay friendly era, a successful radio dramatisation followed, then eventually the Academy Award nominated 2015 movie, starring Cate Blanchett, who had also co-starred in the 1999 screen adaptation of Highsmith's The Talented Mr. Ripley (1955).  

Carol is evocative high-grade literature resembling the modernist British and European classics. I have enjoyed no other American wordsmith so much, even though she falls marginally short of making my all-time favourites list.

Sheer class. Highly recommended reading!