Small g: a Summer Idyll

The subject of HIV testing appears in the novel, though it plays no significant role in either the plot or character development. Rickie has been diagnosed as HIV-positive. When informed of this, Freddie says he is HIV-positive as well. When Rickie's doctor informs him that he lied about Rickie's HIV test results to make him practice safe sex, Rickie reports this to Freddie, who announces his HIV negative as well. He had only misrepresented his HIV status to eliminate Rickie's fear of spreading HIV as a reason for refusing Freddie sex.^[4] According to Andrew Wilson, one of Highsmith's biographers, the false diagnosis is based in part on the experience of one of Highsmith's friends, though he nevertheless finds that in the novel it "strikes an unconvincing note".^[5]

Writing in The New York Times, David Leavitt noted the novel's "superabundance of characters" give it "its air of Shakespearean complexity". Instead of the violent crime one expects from Highsmith, he wrote, Small g presents "a comedy of shifting, unstable identities to which the dramas of sexual uncertainty at its heart add a 90's edge".^[3] More typical is Highsmith's treatment of the novel's villain: "the scenes in which Renate rages at Luisa, or subjects her to increasingly bizarre domestic humiliations, are among the novel's best, fueled by Highsmith's perennial fascination with the erotics of submission and degradation."^[3] Leavitt nevertheless found the passivity of the central character, Rickie, "derails the narrative", and he complained of "pointless subplots" and "pedestrian prose".^[3] "In Rickie's world", wrote Louise Welsh in The Washington Post, "Cupid's arrows take mischievous aim and land with no concern for gender or convenience." She thought the novel had "a compelling narrative but is lacking in character development and literary style" and "reads like an exceedingly good first draft ... perhaps an essentially unfinished work".^[4]