This Sweet Sickness

This Sweet Sickness

First edition
Author	Patricia Highsmith
Country	United States
Language	English
Genre	novel psychological thriller psychological horror
Publisher	Harper & Brothers, US; Heinemann, UK
Publication date	1960
Media type	Print (Hardback & Paperback)
Pages	240 pp (hardback edition)
OCLC	310569021

This Sweet Sickness (1960) is a psychological thriller novel by Patricia Highsmith, about a man who is obsessed with a woman who has rejected his advances. It is a "painful novel about obsessive imaginary love".^[1]

Composition

Highsmith dedicated the novel to her mother Mary: "To my mother".^[2]

Synopsis

Scientist David Kelsey is infatuated with Annabelle, who has married another man, Gerald. Unable to move on from his first love, he labors in the vain hope that she will leave her new husband. He sends her letters and visits her home and asks her to leave her husband even after she has had a son by him. Under the assumed identity of William Neumeister, a freelance journalist who frequently travels, he buys a cabin in the country to serve as their eventual home. He furnishes it for her and spends weekends there as if she were there as well, cooking and serving meals for two. One weekend two of his friends, Wes Carmichael, a coworker who has his own unhappy home life, and Effie Brennan, who is infatuated with Kelsey, secretly follow him to the cabin. David gets into an altercation with Gerald who has tracked him to his weekend hideaway. When they scuffle and Gerald falls and breaks his neck, David reports the death to the police, continuing to identify himself as Neumeister and identifying Gerald as a total stranger to him.

To maintain his two identities, David builds a web of lies, betrayal and denial, relying at key points on the support of others like Effie. He fends off Annabelle's request to meet Neumeister to learn more about the circumstances of her husband's death. He then quits his job, sells his weekend house, and buys a new one nearer to Annabelle in his own name. He repeats his intrusive behavior with Annabell's new beau Grant. Effie and Wes visit David for the weekend. After some heavy drinking and quarreling, their relationships deteriorate rapidly, followed by more violence and David on the lam in New York City pretending to spend the day socializing with Annabelle. When recognized in a restaurant, David runs away, at times suffering from the delusion that Annabelle is fleeing with him.

Reception

Writing in the New York Times, Anthony Boucher called the novel "an impressive psychological study". He wrote:^[3]

Objectively yet compassionately she examines a young chemist who spends his weekends in a make-believe in which that girl did not marry somebody else; and relentlessly she shows how his rejection of reality leads to disaster and death. The book has the compulsion of truth; and probably only a professional reviewer in a heavy season would protest that she might have got the same results in something under 100,000 words.

Adaptations

This Sweet Sickness was adapted in 1962 for an episode of the anthology television series The Alfred Hitchcock Hour. The episode, titled "Annabel," starred Dean Stockwell as David Kelsey. The novel was also the basis for the 1977 French-language film Dites-lui que je l'aime (Tell Her I Love Her), starring Gérard Depardieu as David, which Highsmith did not like.^[4]

Matt Damon, who starred in the 1999 film adaptation of Highsmith's novel The Talented Mr. Ripley, expressed interest in writing "a really strict adaptation" of This Sweet Sickness.^[5]

References