deep water book summary patricia highsmith

Vic realizes he’s caught, Don realizes he’s next, and the two lurch off into an outrageous chase scene. It’s right then, mid-poke, that Don Wilson (Tracy Letts), Vic and Melinda’s writer friend, peeks over a ridge and spies Vic idly jabbing Tony’s corpse. (The water was not deep enough, it seems.) Under the pretense of finding a scarf Melinda left behind, he returns alone the next day, with no real plan beyond poking his murder victim’s body with a stick and hoping for the best. This murder, like the first, seems to pass without incident, until Vic takes the family out to a picnic at the scene of the crime and spots the bloated corpse bobbing around. He ties the corpse of his second victim, a hunky piano teacher named Tony Cameron (Finn Wittrock), to a heavy rock and submerges it in a creek out at a nearby forest preserve. Nothing clarifies that transformation like the ending of Lyne’s Deep Water, after Vic has broken under the emotional weight of Melinda’s multiple, brazen affairs and killed not one, but two of her lovers. That choice transforms a poisonous tale about marital hatred into high-class cuckold porn, and the Van Allens from a tragically mismatched couple into co-conspirators who can’t help but take part in a kinky game. But Lyne’s movie makes one alteration that steers Deep Water toward its most drastic change from the text: Vic and Melinda still have something resembling an active sex life. Both versions of Vic descend into murder when Melinda brings home one too many pretty, dull young men. Here, upper-class stiff Vic Van Allen (Ben Affleck) and his free-spirit wife, Melinda (Ana de Armas), are not New England WASPS, as they were in Highsmith’s novel, but a couple living leisurely in New Orleans on the money Van Allen earned in the business of drone warfare. In director Adrian Lyne’s new filmed adaptation, though, the sex is explicit. Bodies that suddenly bolt upright when another figure enters the room. Published in 1957, the book traffics in whispers and insinuations: A locked door at a bustling costume party. Sex is integral to Patricia Highsmith’s Deep Water - or, at least, the suggestion of it.

Spoilers follow for the plot of Deep Water. Photo: Claire Folger/ Courtesy of 20th Century Studio

Deep water book summary patricia highsmith