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Answered Prayers

Truman Capote

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Jun 02, 2024 Bridget added it

Shelves: 2024

I was curious to read this after reading/watching so much ABOUT it. While it's certainly gossipy and shallow, not up to the heights of Capote's best works, neither is it as bad as its reputation. For one thing, it's unfinished. I was really interested in the Kate McCloud character and whatever he was foreshadowing there that never comes to fruition (it seems very likely that he was going to help her abduct her young son.) Also, it isn't fashionable at all now, but with it's dark humor and more s I was curious to read this after reading/watching so much ABOUT it. While it's certainly gossipy and shallow, not up to the heights of Capote's best works, neither is it as bad as its reputation. For one thing, it's unfinished. I was really interested in the Kate McCloud character and whatever he was foreshadowing there that never comes to fruition (it seems very likely that he was going to help her abduct her young son.) Also, it isn't fashionable at all now, but with it's dark humor and more sexually explicit material, it wouldn't be out of place on the shelf by Chuck Palahniuk's novels.

There are glimmers of the writer's brilliance even here. In one chapter, he writes about a meeting with the fellow author Colette, and his description of her is just pure ... well ... for lack of a better description, CAPOTE:
"... slanted eyes, lucent as the eyes of a Weimaraner dog, rimmed with kohl; a spare and clever face powdered clown-pale, her lips, for all her considerable years, were a slippery, shiny, exciting show-girl red and her hair was red, or reddish, a rosy blush, a kinky spray. The room smelled of her perfume (at some point I asked what it was, and Colette said: 'Jicky. The Empress Eugenie always wore it. I like it because it's an old-fashioned scent with an elegant history, and because it's witty without being coarse--like the better conversationalists, Proust wore it. Or so Cocteau tells me. But then he is not too reliable'), of perfume and bowls of fruit and a June breeze moving voile curtains." (Pg. 35)

It's sad that he got so wrapped up in a a lifestyle of striving to fit in with "society," partying and addiction, because even in this book, a handful of unfinished, mostly vapid pages, it's evident that he had talent to spare. He reminds me a lot of Fitzgerald in that way: a observant, wildly gifted outsider that wanted to be an insider so badly, it destroyed him. I wouldn't recommend this book the generalist, but those who love Truman Capote will get a fuller view of the artist.

Other quotes for reflection:

"The point is, the theme moving through your work, as nearly as I can locate it, is of people achieving a desperate aim only to have it rebound upon them--accentuating, and accelerating their desperation." (Pg. 18)

"... (kindly keep in mind that, intellectually, I am a hitchhiker who gathers his education along highways and under bridges.)" (Pg. 34)

"But despite the waterfall hangovers and constant cascading nausea, I was under the strange impression that I was having a damn good time, the kind of educational experience necessary to an artist--and it's true that a number of those persons whom I encountered in my carousings cut through the Calvados mists to leave scrawled across my mind permanent signatures." (Pg. 61)

...more

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