This Sweet Sickness

David Kelsey has arranged his life around an impossibility. During the working week he lives frugally in a boarding house, a quiet chemist at an industrial firm in upstate New York. On weekends he drives to a house he has secretly purchased — furnished to his exact specification, kept clean and waiting — that he calls Annabelle’s house, because Annabelle is the woman he loves and the house is where they will live together when she realises what he has known all along: that they belong together.

Annabelle has married Gerald Delaney. She has a child. She does not love David and never did. David knows this; but knowing it in the ordinary sense and believing it in the sense that actually governs his behaviour are entirely different things.

This Sweet Sickness is Highsmith’s most concentrated study in what she was always most interested in: the man who has constructed an alternative reality in which he is the protagonist of a different story. David is not sinister in the way Bruno (from Strangers on a Train) is sinister — he is pathetic, deluded, and genuinely dangerous in the way that people who refuse to accept reality are always dangerous. The novel’s trajectory from delusion to violence follows the internal logic of David’s psychology with terrible precision.

Reading Guides

• Patricia Highsmith Books in Order
• Where to Start with Patricia Highsmith

What Distinguishes This Book

Among the qualities that set This Sweet Sickness apart: The psychology of David’s self-deception is rendered with extraordinary precision; The double-life structure is elegantly handled; and More compassionate toward its deluded protagonist than most crime fiction. These strengths are evident from the first pages and sustain across the whole work.

Themes

The thematic concerns of This Sweet Sickness give it weight beyond its surface narrative. Obsession as a form of self-constructed prison. The danger of the man who loves too much and understands nothing. Fantasy as a coping mechanism that becomes a weapon. These ideas emerge from the texture of the work rather than explicit statement, which is the mark of ambitious fiction done well.

Craft and Construction

What lifts This Sweet Sickness above the competent is the control Patricia Highsmith exercises over pacing and information. The reader is never ahead of the story, but neither is the mystery artificially maintained by withholding plausible deductions. The solution arrives feeling earned rather than arbitrary — the definitive test of plot construction in crime and thriller fiction.

Limitations

David’s blindness to reality can become repetitive before the crisis arrives. Less plotted than her more famous thrillers. These are worth knowing before starting, though they are unlikely to diminish the experience for the readers the book is written for.

Who This Is For

Highsmith fans; readers interested in psychological portraits of obsession

Obsessive Love and the Constructed Reality

This Sweet Sickness was published in 1960 and is among the most extreme of Highsmith’s explorations of obsessive love. David Kelsey has rented a second apartment under a false name in a town outside the city where he works — not to conduct an affair, but to construct a domestic space in which he and Annabella Quinn already live together. Annabella has married someone else. She has told David this clearly. None of it has registered.

David as Highsmith Extreme

The delusion in This Sweet Sickness is total and maintained with complete conviction. David Kelsey is not self-deceiving in the way that most of Highsmith’s protagonists are — he is not dimly aware of his compulsion while pursuing it; he has simply constructed a version of reality in which the facts Annabella has communicated to him are not facts. This makes him more frightening than a character who acts against his own knowledge, and it distinguishes the novel from the more ambiguous psychology of the Ripley series or the suburban compromised men of Deep Water and The Blunderer. Highsmith said that she found characters who had fully committed to their own private reality easier to write than characters who retained any ironic distance from themselves — and it shows. The reader’s discomfort arises not from David doing something wrong but from the complete internal consistency of his wrongness.

The French Adaptation and Its Context

This Sweet Sickness was adapted for French cinema in 1977 by Claude Miller, under the title Dites-lui que je l’aime (Tell Her That I Love Her), starring Gérard Depardieu as David Kelsey. The French response to Highsmith’s work was consistently more engaged than the American: French readers and critics saw in her a moralist in the tradition of Dostoevsky and Gide rather than a genre writer, and the adaptation by Miller is a serious one, attentive to the specific texture of David’s self-deception rather than simply to its violent consequences. Depardieu’s performance captures precisely what makes David so uncomfortable as a character: he is large, energetic, and fully convinced of his own feelings in a way that makes the gap between his conviction and Annabella’s reality almost physically painful to watch. The film was one of several French adaptations of Highsmith’s work in this period — Le Talon d’Achille (1967) and Alain Corneau’s Série noire (1979), based on Jim Thompson but deeply Highsmith-influenced — that helped establish her European reputation as a serious literary author rather than a popular novelist. The distinction mattered to Highsmith, who spent most of her adult life in Europe and was consistently better understood by European readers than by American ones.

Final Verdict

Our rating: 4.0/5 — A merciless study in the psychology of obsessive desire — David Kelsey’s constructed fantasy life is both pathetic and genuinely frightening.