Bingo: Sheep. The main character appears to be a meek lamb but proves to be a wolf in sheep’s clothing.
Patricia Highsmith’s Deep Water is the story of a man who repeatedly swallows the humiliation of his wife taking continuous lovers during their marriage. Throughout the book, we follow Victor Von Allen, a seemingly mild-mannered man who runs a printing press for literary works. His wife Melinda is beautiful, dismissive, and chronically unfaithful, even going so far as traipsing her lovers in front of Vic at community parties and staying out all night.
Vic spends a great deal of time masking his feelings by pretending to be amiable to his circumstances, despite Melinda’s constant antagonisms. He affects indifference towards her aggressive need to flaunt her relationships. He no longer shares her bedroom and has a room on the other side of the house, where he oversees his hundreds of pet snails and reads his books. I wondered if the imagery of the snails reflected his own presentation: seemingly hard/indifferent on the outside, but soft/emotional on the inside.
Vic and Melinda attend a party together where her lover Charley is also in attendance. At one point, Vic, with all good nature, tells Charley that he has killed his wife’s previous lover, who was recently murdered. This in fact is not true, but it pleases Vic to put the story out there, to show he has substance and intent.
Deep Water is more about mood and change rather than a mystery, per se. We know who the killer is right away. At another neighbor’s party, Vic finds himself in the pool with Charley. Without warning, on complete impulse, Vic holds the other man under water and brutally drowns him. He casually goes back to the house and waits for someone to find the dead body. Melinda is convinced (rightly) that Vic has killed her lover, but none of the neighbors except one take the accusation very seriously. After all, Vic appears nothing but mild and accommodating to his wife’s way of life.
As the book unfolds, as Vic seems to easily live with his crime and has no worry he’ll be found out, I wavered between my views of him. Melinda is indeed awful–she rubs everything in Vic’s face and promptly takes another lover after Charley. But Vic’s controlled amiability is also grating. Melinda is, indeed, correct that he is a murderer, no matter how hysterically she expresses it. His continuous habit of rolling over in the face of Melinda’s betrayals feels like a power play in itself sometimes, and in particular he never agrees to a divorce. I am mostly sure Vic is indeed as Highsmith seems to paint him–a meek man under increasing pressure–but my growing irritation with his character made me wonder if I’m supposed to see him in a more complex light.
The book is a bit slow, but it held my interest. Highsmith always is great at setting mood and a feeling of dread. It is not as strong as some of her other books I’ve read, but still worthy of a read.
