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In Cold Blood

Truman Capote

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Feb 19, 2019 Cynthia marked it as abandoned-books

Initially my intention was, after 162 pages, to set this aside for a bit because I disliked it so much. It is one of the most boring things I’ve ever read and as much as I wanted to participate in a discussion about it, I do not *have* to read this book. I’ve concluded that there is no reason to further force myself through it. I have no desire to actually pick it back up again. Perhaps true crime is simply not the genre for me. Perhaps Truman Capote is simply not the author for me. Maybe both.

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Mar 31, 2021 Owen DeVries rated it it was amazing

The crime novel was mostly forgotten by cutting edge American novelists during the 1950s and 1960s, its formulas seen as too confining, perhaps even too vulgar for the free spirits of modern fiction. Even more to the point, the idealization of "law and order," inherent to the genre, was unlikely to appeal to a Jack Kerouac, a Ken Kesey, a Thomas Pynchon and the other literary bohemians who increasingly set the tone for the not-so belles lettres of this period, often by means of works that reveal The crime novel was mostly forgotten by cutting edge American novelists during the 1950s and 1960s, its formulas seen as too confining, perhaps even too vulgar for the free spirits of modern fiction. Even more to the point, the idealization of "law and order," inherent to the genre, was unlikely to appeal to a Jack Kerouac, a Ken Kesey, a Thomas Pynchon and the other literary bohemians who increasingly set the tone for the not-so belles lettres of this period, often by means of works that revealed rather a tendency to lawlessness and disorder.

But when Truman Capote finally delivered the great literary treatment of murder and justice of the era, In Cold Blood, his approach deviated markedly from the experimental tendencies of the day. Instead of embracing the outrageous and fanciful, the extravagant and transgressive - areas where he would have enjoyed an inherent advantage as a chronicler - Capote moved towards a scrupulous realism, and a deliberate encroachment on the traditional territory of nonfiction authors. He still relied on the storytelling techniques honed over two decades of writing fiction, yet now brought them to bear on a subject and situation that would normally be addressed by journalists or perhaps sociologists.

On November 16, 1959, The New York Times reported on the murder of four members of a well-to-do family in a small town in Kansas. The Times, then as now, downplayed sensational crime stories, and this brief article, headlined Wealthy Farmer, 3 of Family Slain, would have been easy enough to miss. "A wealthy wheat farmer, his wife and their two young children were found shot to death today in their home," the newswire account began. "They had been killed by shotgun blasts at close range after being bound and gagged...." Fascinated by the few facts provided in this brief story, Capote was soon on his way to Kansas to begin what would turn out to be a six-year odyssey - a period encompassing the investigation of the crime, the arrest of Richard Hickock and Perry Smith, their trial and conviction, and ultimately their hanging on April 14, 1965.

For some time, Capote had been looking for a different way of conceptualizing the modern novel. He felt that little true innovation had taken place since the 1920s, that most stories tended toward either pulp fiction clichés or neo-fabulist excesses. With In Cold Blood he hoped to do something different, construct an essentially non-fiction novel, one which would allow him to replace, in his words, the "self-created world" of the traditional novel, with "the everyday objective world we all inhabit."

Capote had long cut an impressive figure in the literary world, able to command the interest of socialites and celebrities, and even the mass media, to a degree that no later American novelist has been able to match. Yet in researching and writing In Cold Blood, Capote revealed different talents and social skills, sometimes relying on his reserves of charm while in other instances falling back on an almost ruthless pursuit of self-interest. No wonder that, in addition to the story in the novel, an almost equally compelling story behind the novel would eventually come to light, even serving as the basis for its own Hollywood movie, the 2005 film Capote.

In the world of law enforcement, police have limits imposed on them by the courts - restrictions that constrain what techniques they are allowed to employ in eliciting a confession. Authors play by different rules, usually outside the purview of judge and jury, and Capote in this instance was determined to extract a complete account of the grisly murders from the reluctant Perry. At the same time, Capote positioned himself as friend and helper to the condemned man, using this as leverage in his dealings with the prisoner. Critics will continue to debate the thorny ethical questions raised by Capote's research for In Cold Blood. Yet ultimately our author got the raw material he needed for the key sections of his future bestseller straight from the criminal's lips, and the result was one of the most gripping books of the era.

Five months after the murderers' execution, the first installment of In Cold Blood appeared in The New Yorker. And only ten weeks after this serialization was completed, the novel came out in book form to great acclaim...but also controversy. Ever since the rise of romanticism, authors have been allowed, even encouraged, to make grand claims for themselves, but Capote rankled many by asserting the one thing most likely to irritate the literary establishment of the modern day: namely, to have presented the truth, reality, a fiction that wasn't really fiction. The very term "non-fiction novel" spurred a backlash, fueled further by the commercial success of the work. And, indeed, if the essence of the emerging worldview of that period - especially in European currents, but soon to make their way to America - was to deconstruct all claims to truth, and to make even non-fiction look as if it were deception, then Capote was the most retrograde of all, with his reversal of the postmodernist course and stated aim to establish fiction as a pathway to an accurate transcription of events, making it into a type of supercharged narrative both encompassing and transcending historiographical and journalistic techniques.

Capote's control and restraint - characteristics hardly congruent with his public persona - are everywhere in this book. The prose, first and foremost, lives up to his own self-congratulatory praise: "I think most writers, even the best, overwrite," he would later explain. "I prefer to underwrite. Simple, clear as a country creek." And he achieves just that in this novel. From the opening paragraph, the tautness and clarity jump out at you from the painted page:

The village of Holcomb stands on the high wheat plains of western Kansas, a lonesome area that other Kansans call "out there." Some seventy miles east of the Colorado border, the countryside, with its hard blue skies and desert-clean air, has an atmosphere that is rather more Far West than Middle West. The local accent is barbed with a prairie twang, a ranch-hand nasalness, and the men, many of them, wear narrow frontier trousers, Stetsons, and high-heeled boots with pointed toes. The land is flat, and the views are awesomely extensive; horses, herds of cattle, a white cluster of grain elevators rising as gracefully as Greek temples are visible long before a traveler reaches them.

An uncanny sangfroid and lucidity are ever present in this book, contrasting markedly with the unsettling events chronicled, in writing that seems so unobtrusively matter-of-fact, but which Capote must have struggled greatly to craft. But equally impressive is his narrative voice, as important to the success of In Cold Blood as the exemplary flow of the sentences and paragraphs. When he finally presents Smith's account of the murder, Capote almost disappears entirely as an authorial presence. The reader feels drawn directly into the mind of the killer, a chilling effect, but one that is in no way dependent on the familiar pulp fiction devices to create suspense and horror.

This book may be less timely now, dealing as it does with a small town crime more than a half century in the past. Yet In Cold Blood has hardly lost any of its intensity and mesmerizing effect. Even so, few major writers have tried to follow in Capote's footsteps, and this type of vividly realistic writing on crime is still mainly the domain of genre specialists and non-fiction authors. And strangest of all, Capote himself never managed to repeat, or even approach the success of this work. The author who was only thirty-five when he started on In Cold Blood, would never publish another novel in his lifetime, and the surviving fragments stitched together to form his posthumous Answered Prayers suggest that the challenge of living up to the standard set by this bestseller and literary masterpiece was even more than he could face. ...more

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Feb 28, 2012 ImScared3222 marked it as to-read

Shelves: 50-states-50-books

Nov 11, 2024 Jess Penhallow marked it as to-read

Shelves: new-malden, surbiton, wallington

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