TSS: Patricia Highsmith and Slow Reading

I started Joan Schenkar's new biography of Patricia Highsmith a few days ago. Highsmith is one of my favorite authors, and surely a bizarre creature worthy of attention. But 20 pages into Schenkar's book, I'm not sure I'm going to be able to finish it. It's a doorstop, for one thing--700 pages, though at least 100 of them are back matter, appendices and index and notes and so on. Also, these 20 pages, while intermittently interesting, have felt more like a hundred, and I'm not sure I can stand another 580 of them. Schenkar doesn't seem to have met a detail she didn't like enough to include in the book. Some of the writing, too, is maddening.

Example one. A friend of Highsmith's had Highsmith and her mother Mary over for tea. (The two of them had a love/hate relationship, we know going into the story.) After about 90 minutes the two of them left, and the host was left in a state of shock, staring into nothingness for 20 minutes by way of getting over it. So, what can have happened? We're dying to find out. But apart from being told that the air was electric with their mutual antagonism, the only specific we get is that afterwards things were out of place: a tea strainer in the wrong spot, an olive in a plant....

Example two. Regarding Highsmith's typewriter (which actually makes it into the index), Schenkar writes: "The Olympia--a ripple of Leni Riefenstahl runs through its brand name--occupies a major portion of the desktop." Leni Riefenstahl, Wikipedia tells me, filmed the 1936 Olympics at Hitler's invitation, her footage becoming the film Olympia. Now, how is this relevant to Highsmith or her typewriter, apart from the coincidence of the name? It's not, from what I can make out. And the inclusion of this information--it's a small thing I know--annoys me, as it smacks of showing off, a display of erudition having no point. And it makes this over-long book that much longer.

Example three. The writing itself often annoys me. Here's a section describing the aforementioned mother/daughter relationship:

"Chasms of unsatiated pain and need opened in each of them and they devoured each other: first, in love--according to both of them, they had years of only slightly clouded affections, and their early, affectionate letters are the hard copy of these softer feelings--and then in a lifetime of rage and recrimination. There is no mediating a relationship like this, and all their attempts to do so fell into horrible failure. They could not bear each other's company and they could not leave each other alone."

Too vague, too pretentious. In fact, Schenkar's writing, it strikes me, is about as far removed from Highsmith's spare prose as one could get. So...I'm afraid I've read about as much of this as I'll be able to stand.

Patricia Highsmith, Joan Schenkar, biography