Flung Out of Space tells the story of Patricia Highsmith’s early years as a struggling twentysomething writer in 1940s New York, doing hack work to pay the bills while pursuing her dream of becoming a literary novelist. The book follows her creation of and eventual publication of her first two books: Strangers on a Train and The Price of Salt.
It’s not a bad comic - it’s well written and Hannah Templer’s art is excellent - but it’s also lacking in narrative content; it’s a wee bit thin. A lot of the book is a holding pattern of: Highsmith working jobs she hates while struggling with her homosexuality. It’s repetitive and increasingly dull, given its lack of variation, after a spell.
I was surprised to learn that she was a comics writer and at Timely Comics no less - a few years later the company would rebrand as Marvel and the rest is, y’know. She even meets a young Stan Lee, when he was still going by Stanley Lieber (I don’t know whether that really happened or not but it’s a cute touch).
Other than that though, you don’t really learn a great deal about Highsmith or the stories behind two of her most famous novels. She worked at Bloomingdale’s and met a glamorous woman, which ended up becoming the premise for The Price of Salt.
Kudos to Grace Ellis for faithfully portraying Highsmith as the infamously misanthropic and sardonic curmudgeon she was. It makes her a difficult protagonist to like but, by all accounts, that was the person she was (though they try to humanise her a bit via her cute cat Spider).
I do find her attitude rather conceited. She considers comics writing garbage and “real writing”, ie. novels, to be the true art. I’m sure the stuff she churned out at Timely was crap, as most 1940s romance comics were, but I’ve also read - tried to read; I’ve never finished them - some of her novels and I don’t think much of her prose either. It’s certainly not the high art she believes it to be. I think her reputation has benefited greatly from a number of excellent movie adaptations over the years (The Two Faces of January, The Talented Mr Ripley, and Carol are all well worth watching).
I get what Ellis is doing: the story is about the theme of being something you’re not. On one hand, she’s a comics writer but she’s really a novelist; on the other, she’s pretending to be straight but she’s really gay. It’s quite basic though and not substantive enough for an entire book. We don’t get a good understanding of why Highsmith is the way she is - why she turned out so standoffish and surly - so it’s not a successful biographical story in that regard.
But hey representation is the watchword these days, eh? Probably helped get this published. Highsmith as a possibly inspiring figure for her time, though it is like most other people-being-secretly-gay-because-history stories you’ve come across. The Price of Salt is about a lesbian relationship and she originally published under the pseudonym Claire Morgan so that the “pulp” material wouldn’t hamper her burgeoning career - so it was back then. The novel was eventually republished under her preferred title, Carol, and under her real name during her lifetime, so it’s good that there was enough progress for that to happen.
I don’t really care about representation/social justice stories (they’re all the same and grossly oversimplified), but I like literary bios and, as truncated a snapshot as this was of Patricia Highsmith’s writing career, Flung Out of Space isn’t a bad one at that. It’s not edge-of-your-seat reading, and underwhelming at times, but it’s not boring either, you get a decent idea of how Patricia Highsmith got her start in writing and what life was like in 1940s New York.
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