Top 100 Cool Novels, #96, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote
by Ernie on 06/09/07 at 3:28 pm
Ernie’s Top 100 Cool Novels #96: In Cold Blood, Truman Capote (1965). It is quite remarkable to think that a writer as prominent and well-regarded as Capote—he is certainly one of the most recognizable mid-century American writers, a type, if you will—only completed one prolonged, accomplished article of prose, his 1965 “non-fiction” novel In Cold Blood (his debut novel, Other Voices, Other Rooms, is his second-longest sustained effort, and it weighs in at a mere 200 pages in its published form). Ten years in the making, In Cold Blood is generally thought to have destroyed Capote’s capacity as a writer due to the extended emotional and psychological stress associated with the composition.
Unlike his other books, it is not noticeably lyrical or witty. It is deadly serious. One does not detect the light touch that made Capote the bitchy enfant terrible of Manhattan publishing in the 1950s. It is direct, plain, and morally complex, with all the inevitability and some of the majesty of Greek tragedy. A raft of recent movies and documentaries may restore this book to some of the very high reputation it enjoyed for a decade or more after its publication.
Capote was not the first to attempt such a hybrid form, but his experiment was the most prominent example to date, and he did not hesitate to take credit for its invention. He sought to combine the dramatic contours and psychological treatment of fiction—which runs deeper over time—with the “hard facts” and historical accuracy of investigative journalism—which tends to simply pile on information over time to build a case.
Whatever else may be said of Capote, he was justified in his indignant rejoinders to writers like Norman Mailer and Tom Wolfe, who claimed to have created the mold for “novel as history, history as novel” themselves (Mailer’s Armies of Darkness won the Pulitzer Prize, an accolade that eluded Capote). In Cold Blood set the genre going and cast the American mold for this type of writing. The original film, shot on the real locations where the murders took place, is also quite riveting.
