("The Imperfectionist", "The Talented Mr. Ripley")

I'm fairly glad that the book isn't a book club pick, so that I don't have to spend more time with Tom Rachman's unsympathetic characters. The fourth story about the corrections editor with gruff manners is the most upbeat (and the last I read), but overall the outlook is sour:
Paris Correspondent who lived free and large, and now is broke, cuckolded, and ignored by his children.
Business Reporter who's just a desperate spinster and latched onto a happy-go-lucky never-do-well.
The Obituary Writer who lost his daughter and became dedicated and Machiavellian.

• "What I really fear is time. That's the devil: whipping us on when we'd rather loll, so the present sprints by, impossible to grasp, and all is suddenly past, a past that won't hold still, that slides into these inauthentic tales.
• We enjoy this illusion of continuity, and we call it memory.
• Here's a fact: nothing in all civilization has been as productive as ludicrous ambition.
• a simpleton far too cheerful to compose a decent headline

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I don't remember why I thought it's time to give Patricia Highsmith another try. It strains my credulity that there would be parents sending some stranger to get their son back from Europe.  'Decent folks' doesn't explain it.

• Tom wanted to leave. But he hated to leave the man sitting alone with his fresh drink.
• Now he could be maniacally polite for perhaps another whole hour, if he had to be, before something in him exploded and send him running out of the door.
• If there was any sensation he hated, it was that of being followed, by anybody.
• Marge - the good egg type
• It was as if something had gone out of New York - the realness or the importance of it - and the city was putting on a show just for him.. As if when his boat left the pier on Saturday , the whole city of New York would collapse with a poof.