When the milk of human kindness sours

A sculptor is sick of his wife’s being the perfect wife and mother. She’s given up her art for him. She cooks. She takes care of their baby. She’s happy. Despite his urging, she won’t even have an affair. So he kills her. For being too nice. And then he kills himself. By bashing his head against his jail cell wall.

This melodramatic reversal of the usual man-threatened-by-wife’s-career theme is as contrived as it sounds. And yet, somewhere in the midst of the contrivance, one gets a little chill. One starts to think about love and all its delusions, about marriage and how hard it can be, about the way love can die slowly, almost imperceptibly, and how life is filled with losses -- until one is just about ready to do oneself in.

That’s the Patricia Highsmith effect, as demonstrated in “Things Had Gone Badly,” one of 26 stories in “Nothing That Meets the Eye,” a posthumous collection of Highsmith’s short stories. Not previously collected (or in some cases never before published) and spanning 1938 to 1982 (she died in 1995), these stories are classic Highsmith fare.

Not all of them succeed. Some of the narrative tricks are too obviously manipulative, and there are just too many stories that end abruptly and unconvincingly in suicide. Perhaps that’s why Highsmith held some of them back from publication. Nevertheless, whatever their flaws, they all have the Highsmith magical narrative pull. One wants to keep reading, even when the payoff isn’t as strong as it could be, because, however artificial the plot, there is usually a nugget of bitter truth at its heart. Highsmith understood the psychology of people’s darker urges.

It’s startling to realize that some of these stories were written while she was still at Barnard College at New York and, though they may lack the fluency and the light sardonic humor of some of her later work, they are nevertheless extraordinarily accomplished. All the noir themes that characterize her great novels, such as “The Talented Mr. Ripley” and “Strangers on a Train,” are here. There are stories about bad marriages, loneliness, madness, murder, the emptiness of modern life, told with typical Highsmith wit or, occasionally, with a kind of spare, unsentimental lyricism, proving yet again the long-standing critical mantra that Highsmith is Not Just A Genre Writer.

One reason for the critical acclaim is that Highsmith doesn’t write typical murder mystery stories. Her heroes often get away with their dastardly deeds and manage to be simultaneously appalling and likable (Mr. Ripley being the most famous and perhaps most convincing example). In contrast to the feel-good narratives of lesser literary thrillers in which good triumphs over evil, Highsmith’s novels are vehicles to explore the dark side of the human psyche -- the urge to do violence that most people occasionally think about but never pursue. And the murders in her books are the logical outcome of the kind of contorted thinking that hampers everyone from time to time, prompting people to make odd choices that in saner moments they might reject.

There are similar psychologically truthful murder stories in “Nothing That Meets the Eye,” even though, along with most of her previously published short stories, they lack the complexity of her novels. Usually, the stories’ originality comes in the form of a clever twist. In “It’s a Deal,” a man kills his wife, who’s already been beaten nearly to death by her lover. The husband just finishes her off, then frames the lover. In “The Second Cigarette,” a man’s subconscious self materializes to taunt him. When the man tries to throw the annoying shadow off a balcony, the shadow throws him off instead, suggesting that, in fact, the man wants to kill himself.

These murder stories are tinged with the kind of irony that is Highsmith’s trademark in story collections such as “The Animal-Lover’s Book of Beastly Murder,” in which animals get their revenge on humans. In “Music to Die By,” a story in this new collection, a post office employee fantasizes about murdering his colleagues. When he confesses to the bombing of a post office where he used to work, he is imprisoned (even though he didn’t do it) because people believe he is crazy enough to have committed the crime.

What’s different about “Nothing That Meets the Eye,” however, is that the majority of the stories do not involve a murder. Suicide and accidental death, yes, but not murder. In the book’s afterword, German critic Paul Ingendaay suggests that Highsmith may not have attempted to publish some of her earlier work because it didn’t have the commercial allure of a suspense story. And it’s true that these stories focus more on ordinary yearnings and disappointments, such as the loneliness of a working woman in New York City in “Where the Door Is Always Open and the Welcome Mat Is Out” or a woman’s depression and alienation when she marries a Mexican hotel manager in “The Car.” (Though Highsmith was an American who lived most of her life in England and Switzerland, she took many trips to Mexico. A sense of displacement is a common theme in her work.) Many of these stories also feature female protagonists, which is unusual for Highsmith.

In interviews, she said she preferred writing about men because they were more active and therefore more interesting than women. And she has been criticized for her negative portrayals of women in, for example, her collection of short stories, “Little Tales of Misogyny,” in which each heroine represents a female stereotype -- although, as some critics have pointed out, these stories may also be seen as satire. Highsmith also was a product of the conservative 1940s and ‘50s. But she didn’t always fall in with traditional views. The one early book with sympathetic heroines and a happy ending was “The Price of Salt,” about a lesbian relationship, which she published in 1952 under the pseudonym Claire Morgan. Highsmith was a lesbian who didn’t want to be typecast as a lesbian writer. But in 1991, the novel was reprinted in England under her own name with the title “Carol.”

In contrast to the women in “The Price of Salt,” career women who found love and happiness, most of the women in “Nothing That Meets the Eye” are victims, reflecting Highsmith’s belief that women are “pushed by people and circumstances instead of pushing,” as she put it in her nonfiction work “Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction” (1966). Her heroines in the short stories are bitter, unhappy women, including the nagging mother in “A Girl Like Phyl” or the childlike hypochondriac Agnes in “The Pianos of the Steinachs” whose only happiness comes from a fantasy that a visiting music student is in love with her.

At best, the women in these stories are bored housewives cheating on their husbands. The overtly good women are locked into classic sacrificial female gestures. Dying Mrs. Palmer in “The Trouble With Mrs. Blynn, the Trouble With the World” selflessly decides to give her treasured amethyst pin to the mean-spirited nurse who covets it, in protest against life’s “flaw,” the “long, mistaken shutting of the heart.” Or they are given the traditional reward for stereotypical female virtues. The working woman in “Doorbell for Louisa” stays home from work to take care of some sick neighbors and is subsequently asked out on a date by her boss, who misses her presence at work.

To be fair, the men in “Nothing That Meets the Eye” don’t hold up too well either. Many also suffer loneliness and disappointment. Many cheat and lie. And there’s at least one child molester, possibly two, if one reads between the lines. But when men are rewarded in these stories, they, unlike the women, undergo an affirmation of self. In “Man’s Best Friend,” a man who idolizes a woman who’s not quite the goddess he thought learns that he can live happily alone with his dog. And men’s kindnesses are not quite so saintly as the women’s. In “A Bird in Hand,” a man makes his living off reward money for returning missing birds to their owners -- not the actual birds but similar-looking ones he has bought at a pet store. Yet he is seen by his victims as a sort of Santa Claus, spreading kindness throughout the world, even though they are on to his game.

Whatever one makes of Highsmith’s biases -- and I confess I have a built-in antipathy for writers who see the world in such a lopsided, cynical fashion, as a dark place where meanness and manipulation are the dominant emotions -- there’s no doubt that this new collection, however uneven, reminds us that Highsmith was a literary artist who was so accomplished she could seduce the reader even with work that was less than her best.