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Book Reviewed by:Patricia Highsmith's story of romantic obsession may be one of the most important, but still largely unrecognized, novels of the twentieth century.
First published in 1952 and touted as "the novel of a love that society forbids," the book soon became a cult classic.
Based on a true story plucked from Highsmith's own life, The Price of Salt (or Carol) tells the riveting drama of Therese Belivet, a stage designer trapped in a department-store day job, whose routine is forever shattered by a gorgeous epiphany―the appearance of Carol Aird, a customer who comes in to buy her daughter a Christmas toy. Therese begins to gravitate toward the alluring suburban housewife, who is trapped in a marriage as stultifying as Therese's job. They fall in love and set out across the United States, ensnared by society's confines and the imminent disapproval of others, yet propelled by their infatuation. The Price of Salt is a brilliantly written story that may surprise Highsmith fans and will delight those discovering her work.
If lesbian pulp fiction was the Trojan horse providing cover for these women to read about themselves through stories ostensibly meant for men, then Patricia Highsmith's The Price of Salt (1952) was the Trojan horse inside the Trojan horse providing a disguise for a genuine love story between two women. It is widely regarded as the first novel about queer women to feature a "happy" ending. Which is not to say the story is without tragedy. It centers around a 19-year-old woman named Therese Belivet who is working at a New York City department store to make extra money over the holidays. She falls spontaneously and devastatingly in love with an older woman, Carol Aird, who stops in the store to purchase a doll for her daughter. Therese seems to be experiencing same-sex attraction for the first time, but there is surprisingly little fanfare around the question of sexuality (screenwriter for the film adaptation Phyllis Nagy has also commented on this aspect, declaring the premise of the novel to be "two central figures not giving a rat's ass about sexual identity")...continued
Full Review
(1064 words)
(Reviewed by Lisa Butts).
When Patricia Highsmith finished The Price of Salt in 1951, the manuscript was rejected by her publisher, Harper Bros., who had just put out her first hit novel Strangers on a Train. She sent the manuscript on to Coward-McCann (then an imprint of G.P. Putnam's Sons) using a pseudonym, Claire Morgan, and it was accepted for publication. (Coward-McCann went on to publish one of the author's best-known works, The Talented Mr. Ripley, in 1955.) The Price of Salt was not printed with Highsmith's real name on the cover until 1990.
After a single printing by Coward-McCann, the book was published in paperback by Bantam in 1953 with a cover that marketed it as a work of pulp fiction. Lesbian pulp fiction was an entire subgenre at the ...
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