A Capote Reader

Divided into six parts, this volume contains twelve short stories, two novellas, thirteen travel sketches, reportage, celebrity profiles, seventeen essays, and several pieces previously unpublished in book form

"I wish that then and there I had moved to the country. But it was too late, for I had already started my journey to the Earth's interior." Like all of Capote's fiction, Answered Prayers draws heavily on his "real life"; but instead of his Southern childhood, he details here in anecdotal form the "atmosphere of luxurious exhaustion" of the lives of the globe- trotting super-rich. The air of unreality that pervades the book is deliberate; the real acts of extreme people are hard for the imagination to accept. Capote's genius was to enter into those extreme lives as a marginal participant and emerge as an eloquent eyewitness; tragically, he did not emerge intact. Having committed the unpardonable crime of telling how the rich get their money and what they do with their bodies, he was punished with a banishment that contributed to his physical decline. The publication of Answered Prayers in book form is Capote's vindication. Though it adds nothing to the chapters published in Esquire 12 years ago, these fragments of what was never intended as a conventional novel are self-sufficient and forceful. A Capote Reader presents almost everything Capote published with the exception of In Cold Blood in one bargain-priced edition. Few volumes since the Portable Faulkner in 1946 have been better designed to revive a great American author. The short novels are widely read, and Music for Chameleons brought Capote a new audiencebut who today reads his early, sly travel sketches, or The Muses Are Heard, an account of Negro performers in the Soviet Union that is timely and entertaining 30 years after it was written? All the above are contained in this Reader. Dunphy, Capote's lifelong companion, egregiously exploits his name with his "memoir." Capote barely appears in this novelistic treatment of a young priest who may or may not have insinuated himself into Dunphy's life with a mission of "saving" Capote from pills and booze. Uninformative as a memoir, as a Catholic "problem novel" it is trite and overwritten. Rob Schmieder, Boston
Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc.