PanLondon Review of Books (UK)As the ill-advised title might suggest, the book is a sad mess: shallow, mistake-ridden, voyeuristic in tone. It’s hard to get through ... He seems, in any case, to have done very little original research, and most damningly (as far as I can tell), no new interviews. Any lively quotes or choice anecdotes almost always turn out to be borrowed or paraphrased from Wilson or Schenkar. There are proofreading gaffes throughout, including a shocking number of grammatical errors ... Bradford’s responses to Highsmith’s personality and achievement are even more disturbing ... Bradford is curiously unwilling to grant Highsmith’s own erotic life much real-world heft or relate it to any obvious historical context ... rather than acknowledge the homophobic attitudes of the era or, god forbid, the necessary but exhausting apparatus of self-concealment known as the closet, Bradford finds it more plausible to argue that Highsmith kept her sex life under wraps because her ‘lovers’ weren’t real ... Bradford becomes oddly derisory about Highsmith’s fiction—each new novel, he complains, seems more inept and implausible than the last—but he is even more hostile to the woman herself, in an ultimately tedious, dull-edged and deadening way ... By the end, not surprisingly, Bradford seems overtaken by a kind of reductive mania.
