THIS WEEK I’D intended to write about fictional beginnings, it being two days from the new year. But the situation with Congressman-elect George Santos so clearly echoes the plot of Patricia Highsmith’s 1955 novel The Talented Mr. Ripley that instead I’d like to think about stakes. Specifically: what is at stake when an anti-hero behaves in morally bankrupt fashion, whether it’s fabricating a resumé and engaging in sketchy financial dealings like Santos or – spoiler alert – murdering two people and assuming one of their identities a lá Highsmith’s title character Tom Ripley.
In a good writing workshop, the conversation revolves around craft – the strengths and weaknesses of the story’s construction. Pacing, plot, characterization, tone, dialogue. It’s generally held that motivation is key to a good story, and very many times I’ve heard someone ask: What’s at stake for this character? It should be clear what our characters want, what obstacles are in their way, and what happens if their desires are or are not fulfilled. If the story feels boring or anemic, it is often because the stakes aren’t high enough. As writers looking for drama – not unlike voters looking for excellent political representation – we must ask ourselves what matters.
In The Talented Mr. Ripley, Tom is an orphan raised by a harsh aunt, now a bright, if damaged and prospectless, 25-year-old living in the underbelly of New York City. Yes, he’s an admitted liar perpetrating light tax fraud, but he isn’t cashing the checks. We’re wary of him, but we also feel a tenderness as we might for any young person without a support system. When Dickie Greenleaf’s father seeks him out for a mission – to go to Europe and bring dilettante Dickie home to see his mother, sick with cancer – we sense Tom is at an inflection point. He might find a job at which he can work hard and become the respectable gentleman he playacts on the boat to Paris, or he might make more of his dalliances with the criminal and shortcut himself to the upper class by any means necessary. Obviously, the latter makes a better story.
By now you’ve read George Santos’ lies about his personal, professional, and financial background, which are wild, baffling, and too numerous to reiterate here. As a story, it’s a juicy one. We don’t yet know the full truth and aren’t here to be armchair psychiatrists. But what’s interesting is while Tom Ripley is sympathetic, Santos largely isn’t. In a pre-election editorial, a local paper wrote: “This newspaper would like to endorse a Republican for US Congress in NY3 (Oyster Bay, N Hempstead, NE Queens). But the GOP nominee - George Santos - is so bizarre, unprincipled and sketchy that we cannot.” And after this week’s revelations burst into national headlines, even people within Santos’ own party have called for investigations, though not his resignation.
In fiction, there is a thrill in rooting for characters even when they’re deeply flawed; as readers, our personal stakes are low. We sort of want anti-hero Tom to get away with it, especially because we’re annoyed with Dickie and his coldness toward our guy Tom, who is just doing what Dickie’s father asked him to and seems lonely and awkward, in need of a friend. We tell ourselves that if Tom’s parents hadn’t died – if his aunt had been caring – if he’d had a fraction of Dickie’s privilege or even a few lucky breaks – then perhaps he wouldn’t have acted in the way he did. Despite his cold-blooded, self-interested acts, Tom charms his fellow characters and us in the process.
It’s perhaps easy for some of Santos’ ideological supporters to write off his transgressions in similar fashion. If higher education is full of liberal elites, what does it matter if Santos didn’t attend the institutions he said he did – Horace Mann, Baruch College, NYU. If the suits on Wall Street don’t care about the little guy, no matter that Santos didn’t work at Citigroup as he claimed. In this line of thinking, blame can be rerouted away from an individual con man and toward a meritocratic system. In the December 16 Literary Citizen, we discussed what happens when candidates go unquestioned, when party affiliation trumps all; this is more of the same.
Our affinity for con man Tom Ripley happens because he isn’t trying to pull one over on us, the readers. We’re along for his whole journey. He’s not hiding anything or lying to us. In a way, we feel relieved he’s finally achieved a modicum of security. His is a classic, if completely twisted, bootstraps narrative, not unlike the kind we’re acculturated to appreciate in American politicians.
If Santos had run for Congress with what seems to be emerging as his real narrative – a poor kid from an immigrant family, whose mother was a domestic worker, who earned a GED – perhaps his candidacy still would have resonated with voters. But that personal story is missing the critical action to propel him from one world into another. Like Tom Ripley, it seems he wanted to skip the hard part. For many House members, it’s beginning in lower levels of public service and/or undertaking legal careers to obtain deep understanding of America’s institutions and legislative processes. For others, it’s community organizing, or holding a key role within the community – teacher, doctor, farmer. It seems Santos thought he might go the businessman route, where the currency is, of course, money; how much this tactic was predicated on NY-03 being one of the wealthiest districts in the country is unclear.
What is clear is that neither Tom Ripley nor George Santos had much to lose and everything to gain. For Santos, evicted twice, seemingly in financial trouble, his work experience not at Goldman Sachs but at a call center, to become a candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives – and to win that race, and the accompanying power, credibility, and $172,000 a year paycheck – was high stakes indeed.
In Highsmith’s novel we leave Tom, his future secured, picturing his next voyage:
“He saw four motionless figures standing on the imaginary pier, the figures of Cretan policemen waiting for him, patiently waiting with folded arms. He grew suddenly tense, and his vision vanished. Was he going to see policemen waiting for him on every pier that he ever approached?”
There’s Tom Ripley’s punishment: a guilty conscience. With his continued evasions, it’s unclear if George Santos has one. If he does, it hardly seems enough. Santos is not a character who wants to use his ill-gained good fortune to romp around Europe and look at art. He wants to represent three-quarters of a million people in the United States House of Representatives, charged with making daily judgments about the good of the country.
If anything, the question of Santos’ guilt has raised the stakes of his story yet again. While lying on the campaign trail isn’t illegal, he is being investigated by federal and local authorities for financial crimes. He has acknowledged but not apologized for or explained his actions. In a WABC interview this week he said he wasn’t a person who “made up this fictitional (sic) character and ran for Congress,” even though it seems like this is exactly what he did.
Santos may well be sworn in on Tuesday and assigned to committees and paid for his time. But we don’t know where all this doubling-down will lead, what the climax of his story will be. He may, at a future date, be prosecuted and potentially convicted, his days as an elected official behind him. Or he may settle into incumbency as so many House members do, this scandal forgotten as many other scandals before.
Make no mistake that every erosion of our participatory democracy raises the stakes for all of us. It matters that a candidate has offered a false biography to persuade people to elect him to office. It matters that leaders of Santos’ political party seem to be indicating that preserving a narrow nine-seat majority is higher stakes than ensuring ethical elections.
In The Talented Mr. Ripley, Tom is such a singular character that we never consider the possibility of a copycat. George Santos, however, surely found a model in the bombastic former president, whose positions he often quoted on the campaign trail. It is high stakes indeed what kind of precedent Santos himself sets, if getting away with blatant lies continues to be absorbed into the norm.
In this week’s On the Nightstand we asked Dan Zak, Washington Post reporter and author of the nonfiction book Almighty, what he’s reading. This is what he said:
“I don’t read much fiction, but I do return repeatedly to fiction that I adore: newer titles like Madeline Miller’s sumptuous “Circe” and Ottessa Moshfegh’s transfixing “My Year of Rest and Relaxation,” classics like Jerzy Kosinski’s satirical novella “Being There” and Agatha Christie’s plotty, diabolical “And Then There Were None.” I’ve read all these books multiple times; they’re never far from my nightstand. But my favorite novel is the one I’m re-reading now: my first-edition copy of Graham Greene’s rainy, romantic “The End of the Affair” (1951). The prose is as crystalline as its structure, which bevels time and perspective to show how love can be hateful, how disbelief conjures faith, and how the act of storytelling can be both a prayer and curse.
Thank you Angela for such a thoughtful analysis so beautifully written! The Santos situation is bizarre.