Name: Edith's Diary
ISBN: 9780871132963

Patricia Highsmith

To escape the terrible realities of an alcoholic son, a departed husband, a bedridden uncle, and a dreary parttime job, Edith records the activities of a happy family in her journal

Edith's Diary

ikkychan

When I talk about Thomas Pierce’s “Hall of Small Mammals”, I reminisce the power of stories in overcoming harsh realities that I’ve experienced when I was a child; like the story of a heaven filled with happy baby chickens prancing about I came up with to cope with the loss of a pet. However, imagining a fictional world as a coping mechanism is one thing— deluding yourself over the span of years and years constructing an intricate make-believe reality while foregoing any real action to take care of your actual self is a whole different case. This is what was portrayed in Patricia Highsmith’s “Edith’s Diary”. It’s the mid 1950’s. Edith and Brett Howland have just left the hustle and bustle of Manhattan to settle themselves as aspiring suburbanites in Brunswick Corner, Pennsylvania. They decided that it was better for their only son, Cliffie, to experience life in a smaller town and genuinely hope to incite any sort of enthusiasm in the boy’s seemingly purposeless life. The couple is filled with brimming vigor for the life ahead of them, embracing all of the possibilities; the prospect of publishing their own newspaper–the Daily Bugle— for the neighborhood; the new, larger house with more space for Edith to grow her own garden; and the chance for them to be actively involved as member of the new community, cultivating intellectuality and knowledge. What could have been the perfect American Dream was slowly deteriorating as Edith’s life changed for the worse overtime. Brett turned out to be cheating on her with his younger, blonder, richer secretary and decided to get a divorce. Cliffie, who has been showing signs of antisocial personality disorder since he was a child, has proven to want nothing of the life his parents expected him to have. He was caught cheating in his exam and has reduced the possibility of him entering university into practically nonexistent, thus setting him on the path of becoming the town’s clown for life. Brett’s decrepit uncle George arbitrarily chose to stay at Edith’s house and has since been demanding her to take care of his meal, medicine and bedpans, trapping her to be his unpaid carer by choice as he unreasonably strongly refused to hire a professional nurse. Not to mention that on top of all the things, she still has to tackle the financial struggle all by herself as Bugle’s profit is not much and she has to take another part time job to even barely make ends meet. As trouble seems to target her from all different directions and her petite shoulders have bruised from all the crushing weight, she finds consolation in writing entry to her leather-bound diary, in which she tells fictional tales of this alternate reality— one that is parallel to her bitter, real one— where Cliffie grew up into a hunk, got into Princeton, married a girl named Debbie Bowen and went on to have two beautiful kids together. Brett was killed off pretty early and given no future part for him in her diary. These fantasies grew more elaborate and convoluted with small details— like Cliffie’s engineering enterprise in different parts of Asia or the sound her grandchildren make every time Cliffie and Debbie visit the house— ironically as Edith’s life has taken for the worse. The death of her cat Mildew and her great-aunt Melanie who both serve as Edith’s touchstone for emotional support and value, has led her wavering mental stability astray and began her descent into madness as the lines between reality and fantasy blurred even more. This story bears a lot of similarities with Richard Yates’ debut novel “Revolutionary Road” as they both share the common theme of the American suburban nightmare during the Vietnam War in the 1950's, where a lot of people were forced to live in a kind of ‘quiet desperation’ as they suffocated inwardly while maintaining order on the surface. These are trying times as they have to witness young men getting drafted into a hopeless, senseless war and coming back as broken shells of men; the economy fell into pieces as President Johnson unleashed a cycle of inflation; and growing civil unrest as morale is low and nationalism is undermined. But the people are pushed to preserve the illusion of normality and conformity even if their mind were on the verge of mental breakdown behind those closed doors. The tokens of this derangement were pervasive throughout the novel; Edith renovates the exterior of her house but leaves the interior a mess and she keeps up a calm demeanor in the face of Brett’s ‘irrationality’ but kills him off of her diary’s reality as a way for Edith to verbalize her anger toward his adultery. Therein lies the difference between Edith Howland and April Wheeler, the wife character of “Revolutionary Road”. Unlike Edith who keeps her emotions in check to maintain an illusion of control, April was brave enough to express her anger, disappointment and frustration to her husband. Despite the tragic outcome, she was willing to communicate her feelings and get them through her dull, ego-centric husband, albeit through shouts and yells. Whereas Edith has this set of peculiar expectations on herself to be an exemplary wife and mother who is never cross and able to think rationally. The thing is, these social and familial roles or projections that she put upon herself leads to nowhere as it hinders her to deal with the truth; she refrains from talking some sense to her incel son from fear of appearing unsympathetic or unreasonable which leads to Cliffie having no sense of responsibility; she holds back and stops herself from protesting against Brett’s betrayal to appear calm and in control which resulting in her husband’s undermining her rights and leaving his senile uncle George in her home. True, the men in her life are all garbage—especially her son— but I have to admit, the way Edith handles them exacerbates the situation that is already in a dire strait to begin with. This is the third time I’ve read Highsmith book, after “The Talented Mr Ripley” and “People Who Knock on the Door”, and she never failed to amaze me with her terrifying portrayal of the horror of human behavior, especially those who seems like an everyday Joe and wouldn’t hurt a fly. This book might seem like a simple white suburban family drama, but personally as a woman, this is an intense psychological character study as I observe how Edith struggled to have control in an uncontrollable situation, exposing her to the censure of the world for derangements of the mind and lead her to take extreme actions in tragic events. The events themselves are hardly what scares me—it’s the effect that they have that directly steer the character to meet their untimely ends that was truly intriguing, leaving a palpable emotional disturbance long after I finish the last page.

S.M.

well-written and disturbing, especially if you are a mother. The son is a bad seed from early on and the whole family situation is a slow-motion train crash. As always, Highsmith is great at building tension. Even though you have an idea of what's going to happen, you can't put it down. Read this in two late evenings. 

Edith's Diary

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