People Who Knock on the Door

Arthur Alderman is in his senior year of high school in Chalmerstown, a small city in the Midwest. He expects to attend Columbia University in New York City. His hectoring and distant father, Richard, sells insurance and retirement finance packages. Lois, his mother, keeps house and volunteers regularly at the local orphanage. Robbie, his younger brother and only sibling, recovers from a medical emergency, and this inspires a new religiosity in Richard, who insists on church attendance by the entire family. Religious literature soon fills their home. Arthur has his first sexual experience with Maggie Brewster and learns a few weeks later that she is pregnant. With the support of her family, she has an abortion, as Richard tries and fails to persuade Arthur to intervene to stop it. A visitor from the church, Eddie Howell, makes the first of several intrusive visits to pressure Arthur as well. Arthur resists, defending Maggie's right to decide for herself; he draws on his passion for science to reinforce his feelings of how inferior he feels the 'religious' people are. The confrontation further transforms his relationship with his father: "Eddie Howell was a sick prig, Arthur thought, and so was his father to be sitting there with a solemn face, concentrating on this twit–fifteen or twenty years younger than his father–as if he were God himself or some kind of divine messenger."^[6]

Arthur is now persona non grata in his own family, weakly supported by his mother and visiting grandmother. For support he leans on an elderly woman neighbor, his friend Gus, and his employer for the summer at a local shoe store. He bonds with Maggie's mother. Without his father's financial support, he arranges to attend the much less expensive local university instead of Columbia. Robbie seems to adopt his father's moral principles, though he is otherwise socially odd, spending his free time fishing or hunting with a group of older men in a strange community of misfits. He becomes an increasingly dark and sullen presence; Richard appears not to notice, Lois voices some concerns which go nowhere. Arthur's relationship with Maggie's survives several months of separation while she is away at Radcliffe. When she and Arthur bolt the doors to ensure themselves some privacy in the Aldermen house, for a few hours during Christmas vacation, Robbie raises alarms and Richard orders Arthur to move out of the family home.

Richard has become increasingly involved in church activities and participates in outreach programs and counseling. He devotes exceptional amounts of time to Irene, a former prostitute who earns a meager income waitressing at a local truck stop. Irene becomes an ever more intrusive presence. Her pregnancy leads to a dramatic resolution of the Alderman family's conflicts.

The New York Times reviewer noted that the subject was "something of a departure from her usual analysis of aberrant personalities" and "surprisingly dull" and "a bit of a yawn". She complained that Highsmith focused on a "sympathetic yet unexceptional youth" ill-suited to "her brilliant insights into criminal psychology" that might better have targeted his brother and father.^[7] The reviewer for The Tablet, a London-based Roman Catholic journal, wrote: "One of the annoying things about this cold story is that it forces one to take the wrong side, for Arthur and his mother are so nice in spite of their behaviour, while Richard and Robbie are so odious in their righteousness -- maybe because of it, the author seems to suggest." She praised "the atmosphere of small-town summer" but faulted the denouement: "It is some kind of solution, but not a comfortable one; Miss Highsmith can do much better than this callous if skilful story."^[8]