UBC: Truman Capote, In Cold Blood

In Cold Blood by Truman Capote

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


I first read In Cold Blood in 1991, when I was sixteen. It terrified me then and it terrifies me now. But I'm a much more sophisticated reader now than I was then, and so I can actually talk a little bit about what makes this book so incredibly effective.

One is the narrative voice. Capote is detached, omniscient, and he understands the art of underselling. Unlike many true crime books, In Cold Blood never tries to tell its readers when to feel outraged; it leaves it up to them to do that work. It tells you what people do, and when it can, it tries to talk about why.

The second thing (and I think this is why the book's ability to terrify me remains uneroded after 25 years) is the recurrent, persistent theme of isolation. The isolation of the Clutters' farmhouse, the isolation of each of the family members in their terrible deaths, and the persistent isolation of their murderers, both physically in their cells in Garden City courthouse and on Leavenworth's Death Row (and isn't that a grisly reworking of Huis Clos? Perry and Dick stuck with only each other for eternity) and psychically (by which I mean "in terms of the psyche," not "in terms of one's psychic powers"): part of Perry's diagnosis of schizophrenia is his inability to connect deeply to other people, and Dick, for all his surface charisma and his insistence on being "normal," and for all the painfully ironic normality of his family, has no ability to reach out to other people, no shred of empathy in all his empty chrome-shiny soul. The book gives the feeling that all human relationships are precarious, that we are all isolated and vulnerable, alone beneath the wide, empty sky, listening to "the whisper of wind voices in the wind-bent wheat" (343).

In Cold Blood is not entirely factually accurate (the wikipedia entry has a section on the book considered as nonfiction), and normally I would be up in arms--I won't read Erik Larson for crimes that Capote blatantly commits: he tells us what the murder victims thought and felt, he provides passages of dialogue that he can't possibly have a verbatim source for, he moves things around to suit his narrative purpose. And certainly I would never dream of using In Cold Blood for anything that I couldn't find a corroborating source for, but either because I first read the book when I was sixteen and did not have a keen grasp on primary sources and how to use them or because the damn thing's a masterpiece, I can't help giving Capote a free pass.

N.b.: if you want to , you can Google for pictures of the crime scene(s), but you'd better be really fucking sure before you hit the search button.



View all my reviews