SOURCE: "Savage Swiss Army Knife," in The Observer Review, No. 10612, March 13, 1995, p. 19.

In the following review of Small g: A Summer Idyll, Sage discusses the plot of the work and examines Highsmith's characterization and depiction of sex.

Patricia Highsmith's (posthumous) new novel [Small g: A Summer Idyll] starts out in cool, utterly characteristic vein. A beautiful boy, a character we've hardly had a chance to meet, is murdered on page two by strangers who'll never be caught—not in any story she's responsible for. And, to add insult to injury, Lulu, a self-possessed performing dog ('a circus dog, from circus stock'), is introduced as a character in her own right, one who takes up more or less as much space as the humans, and has about as much inner life as most of them, too.

Highsmith once notoriously confessed that if she saw a kitten and a baby...