Time & Identity

We scatter tiny virtual breadcrumbs wherever we go on the Internet. It’s a reality we live with unless we are willing to live “off the grid”—a near impossibility for anyone working in the 21^st century. I’m sure I’m not alone in fearing identity theft. Most of us simply balance issues of convenience with privacy, and hope that the precautions we take make us less tempting to identity thieves.

I was thinking about this while reading a new novel entitled ‘Tangerine’ by Christine Mangan. After hearing the author interviewed on NPR, I treated myself to what promised to be a Patricia Highsmith-ish noir, set in Tangier in the 1950s. It’s a marvelous book in the ilk of ‘The Talented Mr. Ripley’—complete with deception, delusions, expats in an “exotic” setting on the cusp of revolution, class & gender distinctions, and lots of alcohol.

It was very much in the mold of Highsmith!

It was also set in a Highsmith era. Before mobile phones, PIN codes, chipped cards, the growth of air travel, and all the conveniences and hassles that are part of our identity today. I read it while traipsing around the Rome of 2018—a thoroughly modern city, full of ancient ruins, baroque churches, Caravaggio, Bernini, palazzos, fountains, and tourists from around the world navigating with their mobile phone apps and texting selfies to friends back home in front of historic monuments.

In Newark International, as placed my hand on the screen so my fingerprints could be compared to my ID in the system, I realized that the mutable identities of Highsmith’s famous characters (and the deceiver in ‘Tangerine’) would require a high tech aspect if the stories were set today. It is simply harder—or perhaps more technologically sophisticated—to assume or create new identities now. ‘Tangerine’ required that particular time & place to succeed as a story.

Rome, as a place for expats and writers, is a marvelous location to create a persona or locate a noir story, but identity has changed since the days of Ripley. I’d very much like to read (or possibly write) a noir of that quality, but could it work in a world of Google maps, Global Entry, and credit cards with chips?