This Sweet Sickness

by Patricia Highsmith

Book Overview

David Kelsey, a young scientist, has an unyielding conviction that life will turn out all right for him; he just has to fix the Situation: he is in love with a married woman. Obsessed with Annabelle and the life he has imagined for them--including the fully furnished cabin he maintains for her--David prepares to win her over, whatever it takes. In this riveting tale of a deluded loner, Highsmith reveals her uncanny ability to draw out the secret...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0393323676
• ISBN13: 9780393323672
• Release Date: October 2002
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Length: 288 Pages
• Weight: 0.62 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.5" x 8.4"

Customer Reviews

One of the most pathetic characters I've ever encountered.

Patricia Highsmith's genius always seems to lie in her most pathetic and delusional characters. The most amazing thing to me about this novel is the fact that it is so readable and suspenseful even though the protagonist is completely unsympathetic and a horrible snob. Although I hated the character he was brilliantly realized and Highsmith evokes the upstate New York setting perfectly. In some ways Anabelle is just as responsible for the tragic events of the novel as David. Her infuriating passivity and wish y washy personality influence the course of the story just as much if not more than David' obsessive pursuit of her. This Sweet Sickness is up there with Deep Water and Cry of The Owl as not just the best of Highsmith's work but the most definitive of her views towards marriage and the domestic life which, even though they are misguided and abrasive, are extremely entertaining. If you are a Highsmith fan you will love this book. If you aren't familiar with her though I would say you should read Strangers On A Train or some of the Ripley novels to get a feel for her style or else you won't really be able to appreciate what she does in this work. It does stand alone as a novel but it is so intense that her other novels might dissapoint you if you read this one first.

An excellent novel

Earlier a reviewer wrote that Highsmith "hated men." This is entirely untrue: If you read her biography by Wilson, which includes excerpts and information from her diary, you will see that in fact she was a huge fan of the male sex and considered males superior in many respects to females. Many of the female characters in her books were problems for her to develop (one example from her diary is Heloise in the Ripley books) because she didn't feel she could identify with them. Very few of her protagonists, consequently, are female. This Sweet Sickness exhibits first and foremost Highsmith's ability to deal with human emotion and the depth of the human psyche in her literature. The protagonist's desperation throughout the novel is obvious to the reader, although it does not actually fully surface until he starts to slip in the final chapter, and this exemplifies Highsmith's style. The police chase through Central Park is one of the most beautiful scenes I have ever read, and the climax that follows is successfully and powerfully tragic. This Sweet Sickness is a terrific novel that follows the usual Highsmith "formula" but with a unique, and heartbreaking ending. A recommended read.

How sweet it is

This is without question Patricia Highsmith's finest novel. A tale of difficult love (apparently a running theme in Highsmith's work, whether negative -- as here -- or positive -- as in SMALL G: A SUMMER IDYLL) and declining sanity, and overall, as Graham Greene put it, apprehension. We wait for things to happen and oh, how we are rewarded.So, the setup is: David Kelsey, a young (late-twenties) chemist who lives in a boarding-house in Froudsburg, NY, is desperately in love with Annabelle, who loved him once but has now married Gerald, who David sees as a boor unworthy of her. He anticipates her leaving Gerald and living with him -- so much so he's bought a house in a neighboring town, fully furnished it, even including pictures of her; it waits while he continues to call her and send her letters -- which enrages Gerald, who finds out about the other house and goes to it while David's there in order to kill (or at least harm) him. David kills him, instead -- by accident, and kind of in self defence, though -- and informs the police in the other town under the name he bought the house by: William Neumeister. His friends -- and Annabelle -- don't know about Neumeister, the police don't know of David's life as himself in Froudsburg, and so he has to try to keep them both in the dark of either "person." And everything starts sliding downhill from there.The tension is superbly built as the novel progresses, after the start creates a very palpable air of uneasiness in establishing The Situation (what David calls Annabelle's being married). And while, as others pointed out, the police are fairly incompetent here, it doesn't entirely detract from the novel -- although it may bother you with its lack of logic when you read it. But it's soon lost as the novel continues. What makes it so good is that rather than dealing with mere criminal tendencies, we find ourselves plunged with David headlong into the world of insanity -- which you don't usually in a Highsmith novel, at least not in the sense here; if the murdering is in Highsmith's other books is a form of insanity, it at least seems connected to reality. But here . . . The last 30 or so pages must be perhaps the most stunning portrayal of insanity ever written. (Of course, I may be wrong there, but it's still amazing as it stands.) It all leads to an incredible ending.So the last quarter of the book or so is worth the price of the entire book alone. Read it NOW.

when too much love is BAD thing...

This Sweet Sickness is a short yet accomplished work by Patricia Highsmith which chronicles the life of a young man obsessed with a former (and now married) girlfriend. He is completely delusional in thinking their relationship lives on, and his mental state degrades rapidly with rather disturbing (and violent) consequences. As usual, Patricia Highsmith unveils the 'sickness' of her main character very slowly. This allows the reader to really judge matters from the main character's perspective, regardless of his/her mental state.The only negative aspect with This Sweet Sickness is how the police force are viewed, in general, as incompetent in solving a murder (..I won't say who is killed, nor divulge whom the killer is). Other Highsmith novels portray the police as cold yet extremely capable. This mistreatment of the police force almost turned me off from This Sweet Sickness completely. However all is forgiven with the novel's ending, which is truly beyond belief (let's just say the main character's mental state is completely shattered). It is perhaps one of the most memorable endings to any novel I have read.So This Sweet Sickness is a worthy read overall.

A strange story of sexual obsession and deteriorating sanity

David Kelsey is a scientist whose unrequited love for a woman named Annabelle has not diminished over time, even though she has gone on to marry another man and give birth to a baby. Highsmith's protagonist--like most Highsmith protagonists--has a sense of perverse righteousness and a profound freight of guilt that he carries everywhere. The dreariness of the setting--largely a rooming house in a sad little upstate New York town--creates a nice counterpoint for this tale of consuming love and delusion. The final pages of the book, which take David into full-scale psychosis, are truly stark and believable. This, we feel, must be what it's like to be insane. And the last line of the book is, well, a killer