( 6 reviews )
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Posted: Nov 17 2007
Anyone who has read In Cold Blood by Truman Capote knows that it was his best writing. He created a new genre of reporting and fiction combined by immersing himself in the subject of his book. He spent months living in Kansas where the Clutter family was murdered and many hours with the two young men who did the killing. After the blockbuster book came out, Capote was catapaulted into celebrity and high society. This book is so interesting because it follows Capote's life from childhood through his rise and fall from grace. His friends and acquaintances tell the story as if you were sitting there listening to them discuss Capote, the good and the bad. Truman was an elfin sprite, full of stories, not all true but extremely entertaining. But at the end of his life he was using drugs and alcohol to deaden the frustration of being unable to top his masterpiece book and finding nothing better to write about, turned on his high society friends, writing a tell all book about them using thinly disguised characters. Because of this, the people who made him, dropped him out of their lives completely, leaving him bewildered. He had wrongly assumed that they would understand and forgive him. After that he simply drifted and declined physically, drinking until his body gave out. He died in the arms of his best friend Joanne Carson, exwife of Johnny Carson. He knew he was going and begged her not to call for help, as he was worn out and finished. I think I would like to read In Cold Blood again, this time with a different understanding of Truman Capote.
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Posted: Jul 16 2007
As a fan of Plimpton's witty style, I picked up the Capote biography, only to realize that Plimpton didn't write it. Instead, he interviewed dozens of people and let them tell Capote's life story. At first, I was mildly disappointed but soon understood the irony: Capote was infamous for his gossipping, and now these acquaintances are gossipping about him. In the same way that Capote created a "nonfiction novel" with In Cold Blood, Plimpton compiled a "subjective biography" that focuses on Capote's public persona more than his private life. (Perhaps because much of his private life was public.) The interviews are colored by the subjects' relationships with Capote, and many of them have an agenda in talking about him, so I would not recommend the book to someone who wants to read a factual chronicle. However, it is entertaining and gives a portrait of the New York high society--in which authors had a place, unlike today (I think)--probably better than a standard biography could provide.
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Posted: Nov 5 2006
Full of salacious detail and struck through with the the vagaries of human nature, this oral history highlights, in an immensely readable way, the arc of ambition that propels the talented Tuman Capote to reach beyond the world into which he was born. The journey takes us on a wonderful romp through post WWII New York society and careens toward a place where our subject falls to his own singular sirens. It was a great Nantucket beach read.
