Imogene loves Victorian stories about orphans & is truly charitable & loving Jule is a genius at self-fashioning, mastering fighting skills & regional accents (I so envied her ability to switch convincingly amongst “BBC” “general American” “East Coast” & her native “Alabama” dialects (caught nicely by the Audible reader) as well as her excellent muscle tone & survival skills. (With so-called “literary fiction” it’s the other way round – when I was a teenager, Hemingway, Faulkner & Amis were contemporary authors now we have Julian Barnes & Amis fils.) Reviewers have also complained that Lockhart’s principal characters Jule & Imogene are not “likeable” & I thought to myself, Who ever liked Tom Ripley & Dickie Greenleaf? The difference for me is that unlike Tom & Dickie – a cheap conman & an idle poseur – Jule & Imogene are both highly admirable. For very different reasons, just as Highsmith’s The Price of Salt reminded me how much better off we are not to be still living in the ‘50s our thrillers are much better. What you may not know is that this one is a vastly more entertaining & artistically crafted than its progenitor – a bit like comparing Homer & Virgil. Lockhart’s story is based on Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. My rather staid VW new beetle is quicker 0-60 mph than a Jaguar XK-140 of the mid-last century.
Genuine Fraud (the oxymoronic title is perfect) reminded me that most things really are better than they were sixty years ago.
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