On the Mend, review by Maile Meloy

  

DRIVING ON THE RIM

By Thomas McGuane

306 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $26.95

     The narrator of Thomas McGuane’s new novel, “Driving on the Rim,” is a Montana doctor who was given the name Irving Belin Pickett by his patriotic, evangelical mother, after the writer of “God Bless America.” Berl, as he’s known, describes himself as “irritable, hypercritical, obsessively orderly, claustrophobic, impatient, antisocial and agoraphobic, filled with objectless dread, pessimistic and fault-­finding.” All this might be true, but he’s also a good doctor, and he’s funny, sometimes with a sharp, sardonic wit and sometimes with a goofy self-deprecation. In the way of McGuane’s earlier American quasi ­heroes, he’s both competent and hapless, discovering, in his search for meaning, “that I was remarkably unformed for a man of my age and experience.”

The novel is a picaresque, circling back to Berl’s early life with unstable, itinerant parents and a lustful aunt. When his parents catch the 14-year-old Berl in bed with her, “the fact that they were guests in Aunt Silbie’s double-wide in no way prevented their attempting to chase her outside without her clothes. It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single woman in possession of a trailer has a gun, and Silbie pulled hers on Mom and Dad; just to make a clean sweep of it, she evicted all three of us.”

The boy needs a mentor, and finds one in a bird-hunting physician, Dr. Olsson, just when his parents have “entered a period they called Boozing for Christ.” Dr. Olsson’s life is ordered and disciplined where Berl’s is chaotic. He wears glasses except to shoot, and has a bird dog so reliable that “when she was pointing a covey he patiently removed his glasses, slipped them into his pocket, and then flushed the birds.” He takes the boy hunting and eventually sends him to college in Ohio. Berl becomes a doctor to please his mentor, and also, he admits, out of a desire to be rich.

Complications arise, as they often do for McGuane’s characters, in the form of a woman, or actually two women, or actually three or four. One is an archivist named Tessa Larionov, with “the look of a Tartar, wry and a little dangerous.” At 30, she has lured an elderly rare-prints dealer back to Montana, with a covetous and curatorial eye on his collection. The 20-year-old Berl falls in with Tessa after she accuses him of making obscene phone calls. “Oh?” he says to the police chief, in the equable (and ineffectual) way he will respond to later accusations of other crimes. “I don’t own a phone.” Their affair is brief, and while Berl makes his way through medical school and back home to practice, Tessa’s life disintegrates, and she winds up disinherited and homeless.

Meanwhile, a patient named Clarice, whom Berl met when she was an inventive young hitchhiker, has become resigned to beatings by her evil-minded husband. When the abuse finally leads to murder — “I told her nobody can live on Chicken McNuggets and popcorn,” her husband says by way of justification. “It’s not like she wasn’t warned” — Berl’s considered medical opinion is that the man should kill himself too, and for once his advice is taken.

Shortly after the murder-suicide, the once indomitable Tessa arrives in Berl’s emergency room, having stabbed herself with a bread knife. He tries to save her but can’t (he’s the only one who can tell us that, but I believe him). In a small town full of rivalries and rumors, suspicions mount that he killed Tessa, and because Berl feels guilty about Clarice’s husband’s death, he refuses, in a detached and fatalistic way, to defend himself. He pleads nolo contendere to the entire town.

But that’s only the beginning. Almost exactly halfway through the novel, a plane crashes, dropping an auburn-haired pilot named Jocelyn Boyce into Berl’s life. She gives him something not to feel detached about, but she’s a whirlwind of trouble. Berl’s quest to be shriven for his crimes, as if that will provide a comprehensible shape to his life, veers off into an extended, deluded search for Jocelyn.

As with McGuane’s earlier novels, the rambling plot is sustained because the individual episodes are a pleasure, often farcical and always acutely observed, and because the hero is sympathetic in his dissociated journey. (McGuane’s ­essays and short stories, on the other hand, are taut and controlled, and he expertly handles their cutting-horse turns.) In one of the funniest passages, Tessa and Berl take a tango lesson, with ­disastrous results. “Señor!” the Argentine master cries. “Grappling has no place in our national dance!”

Berl’s patients show up throughout with medical complaints, even after he’s expelled from his clinic, and his interest in their life stories belies his claims of self-absorption. He also has a best friend to stand by him: a lovely and opinionated pediatrician named Jinx Mayhall. She knows Berl is driven by guilt and desire, but thinks, according to his lawyer, that he’s “cuter than a speckled pup.” She likes his wit and despairs of his folly, and waits for him to come around. “You seem to have dropped a stitch right in the middle of your life and it is time for you to do something else,” she tells him. “Perhaps you find it difficult living in a morally bankrupt and hate-filled nation, and it’s not for me to say. But you go around like a cat ruining a blanket trying to find a place to lie down.”

McGuane’s characters are always keenly written, and that makes it bewildering when continuity falters and the illusion that they’re real people falls apart. Depending on which clues I used from the book, Berl Pickett was born no earlier than 1964, or in exactly 1960, or in the 1940s. I’ve thought about whether this could be intentional unreliability in the narrator, but I think it’s just a mistake that should have been caught in editing — and it’s one of many. Another character is both 65 and in his mid-30s at the same moment, and a third is both alive and dead.

In some ways, such continuity errors don’t matter; in other ways they really do. It matters whether Berl is in his 30s or his 60s when he’s chasing the wrong woman — not just to how we picture him physically, but to how we experience and enjoy and weigh him. It’s hard to know what to do with both possible ages, except to wish, presumptuously, for a time machine and a crack at the book in manuscript.

Still, there are riches here, especially sentence by crackling sentence, and ­McGuane is as good as ever on the redeeming aspects of a troubled country — on diving prairie falcons, the satisfactions of work, and people who tell absurd stories about themselves on their way to growing up. The hedonistic lawyer defending Berl against homicide charges tells him: “Giving freaks a pass is the oldest tradition in Montana. And you, my friend, are a blue-ribbon, bull-goose freak.” It’s my favorite line in the novel, and you can’t help rooting for Berl to figure things out. Because everyone drops a stitch now and then, and who’s to say that we all shouldn’t get such a pass?

Maile Meloy’s latest book is a story collection, “Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/24/books/review/Meloy-t.html?nl=books&emc=booksupdateema3&pagewanted=print

As Pirates Swash Their Buckles, review by Janet Maslin

DJIBOUTI

By Elmore Leonard

279 pages. William Morrow. $26.99

Monday is Elmore Leonard’s  85th birthday. It is also Columbus Day 2010, a national holiday. Coincidence? Perhaps. But this is as good a time as any to acknowledge America’s hippest, best-loved, most widely imitated crime writer as a national treasure. 

In honor of the occasion Mr. Leonard seems to have given himself a couple of birthday presents. First of all, he calls his 44th and latest novel “Djibouti” just because he loves the sound of that name. Second, he gives “Djibouti” Xavier LeBo, a studly 6-foot-6-inch black leading man who, at 72, has lost none of his appeal to pretty young women. And he puts Xavier on a small boat with a smart, tough and alluring younger woman, a pale-skinned blonde who also happens to be a prizewinning filmmaker.

Mr. Leonard was very taken with Kathryn Bigelow (“The Hurt Locker”) when he met her years ago and took care to send her an early copy of this novel. “Djibouti” follows a very Bigelow-like director named Dara Barr as she heads for East Africa to make a film about pirates. Dara specializes in documentaries about tough subjects, so she has made films about Bosnian women, neo-Nazis and Hurricane Katrina.

(“Dara, you nailed that hurricane,” somebody tells her.) Now she wants to find out about the very dangerous Republic of Djibouti, whose port is conveniently located near both the Gulf of Aden and the home turf of Somali pirates. Dara thinks real pirates might be great on camera.

Neither Dara, Xavier nor, apparently, Mr. Leonard is exactly sure what opportunities Djibouti will provide. In a book without a powerhouse plot but with plenty of the old familiar crackle, Mr. Leonard simply flies his principals to this exotic spot and then imagines which other opportunists might be drawn to the place. He hits pay dirt with a noisily ostentatious Texan named Billy Wynn, who can count a big boat, an elephant gun and a model named Helene among his favorite possessions. Helene, this book’s funniest character, is willing to sail around the world with Billy on the off chance that he will marry her and write her into his will.

The pirates’ paradise of this novel turns out to be a lot more civilized than it sounds. For one thing, the pirate kingpins are a gentlemanly lot, what with their European pretensions and large sums of discretionary income. Dara has the gift of charming these people while filming them covertly for possible use in her magnum opus. She gets to know the courtly Idris, whose day job as a pirate leader does nothing to diminish his skills as a debonair party host, and Ari Ahmed Sheikh Bakar, a Saudi diplomat who has done his best to anglicize his name into “Harry.” Then Dara goes back to the boat that she and Xavier have rented and tries to figure out what she has captured on camera and what, exactly, is going on.

“Xavier LeBo believed was he 10 years younger, they’d be letting good times roll all over this boat,” Mr. Leonard writes of the book’s never-say-die hero. But Xavier’s dealings with Dara are professional, at least until he goes and purchases something called horny goat weed from a local merchant. Mostly, the two engage in a nonstop debate as to what kind of film Dara ought to make. What soon becomes clear to both of them is that the idea of Somali pirates as misunderstood underdogs is not going to fly. The hijacking of a tanker filled with liquid natural gas is one good reason to think that this region is getting ready to explode.

Mr. Leonard is on familiar turf when it comes to the pirates’ punk aspirations to live large. (Xavier’s explanation of what the pirates do: “They on the sauce gettin millions for their ransom notes.”) And he’s great with eccentricities, particularly Billy’s, once Billy starts reminding Helene of the Sterling Hayden character in “Dr. Strangelove.” But “Djibouti” has links to serious business that the book can’t just take lightly. Real events, like the 2009 attack by Somali pirates on the Maersk Alabama and rescue of Captain Richard Phillips by United States Navy Seals, are used to lend gravitas to the novel’s exotic setting.

Mr. Leonard also allows the shadow of terrorism to loom. He creates a character who has an Arab’s name, Jama Raisuli, but an American’s rap sheet and criminal record. And he derives most of his suspense this time from the question of how dangerous Jama will be. In a novel not otherwise overly concerned with plot, there is drama attached to whether Jama’s real name can be found. If he turns out to be a real American-born jihadi, he may be worth serious reward money from the American government. But characters in “Djibouti” who get too inquisitive about Jama’s identity have a way of winding up dead.

How does Dara’s filmmaking figure in all this? Perhaps autobiographically, since it lets Mr. Leonard regularly step back to contemplate the storytelling process. We watch Dara and Xavier talk over the material they’ve collected and the different ways they might put it together. Are they making a documentary? Should they turn it into a drama? Are there scenes they need to boost artificially or does the truth speak for itself? The 85-year-old birthday boy already has the how-to manual “10 Rules of Writing” to his credit, but he delivers a little more literary advice here by demonstrating how these filmmakers work. It’s simple: Ask the right questions. Then come up with the right answers.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/11/books/11book.html?ref=review&pagewanted=print

Pirate Latitudes, review by David Kamp

Pirate Latitudes, review by David Kamp

DJIBOUTI by Elmore Leonard

279 pp. William Morrow/HarperCollins Publishers. $26.99

     What’s up, you might ask, with the Sir David Lean-ish title? For 50 years, Elmore Leonard has specialized in hoodlums who ply their trade in tacky, unexotic locales: guys like Chili Palmer, the Miami loan shark whose moviemaking aspirations take him to ­B-list Hollywood in “Get Shorty” (1990), and Stick Stickley, the Detroit ex-con whose heisting aspirations take him to the gutter-ball precincts of Chili’s Miami in “Stick” (1983).

     Can “Djibouti” really be set in the tiny East African nation that abuts Somalia and the Gulf of Aden? If the past is any precedent, it’s more likely that Leonard is using said nation’s irresistibly suggestive name as the pretext for some leering character’s off-color heinie joke.

     But two paragraphs in, it becomes clear that the African setting is for real. Dara Barr, a documentary filmmaker from New Orleans, touches down in Djibouti in an Air France plane. Dara, too, is a departure from the Leonard norm. She has no criminal past, and the only big score she’s hustling for is a cinematic one: she’s come to the Horn of Africa to make a movie about Somali pirates.

     Though only in her 30s, Dara is an accomplished director with the full complement of her profession’s prestige hardware: a Cannes award for her film about oppressed women in Bosnia, a Sundance trophy for her picture about American white supremacists and an Oscar for her most recent doc, a you-are-there portrait of her hometown as it was swallowed up by Hurricane Katrina.

     Her cameraman and sidekick is a fellow New Orleanian whom she met on the Katrina project, a slender 6-foot-6, 72-year-old black man named Xavier LeBo. Xavier has spent most of his life as a crewman on merchant ships, and thus has both the sailing and life experience to help Dara navigate the region’s choppy waters, literally and figuratively. He also comes equipped with the Leonard penchant for folksy speech that does away with relative pronouns (“Situations can rise up you never been in before”; “Get financin from some rich guy loves you”).

     Dara’s simple goal at the outset is to talk to the pirates, to “get their side, the entire shipping world against them,” as she puts it. But to paraphrase another great documentarian, Marty Di Bergi of “This Is Spinal Tap,” she gets more, a lot more. She makes the acquaintance of a suave pirate, Idris Mohammed, who defies her gritty preconceptions by living extravagantly in a Somali McMansion and a Djibouti bachelor pad while he awaits ransom payments for the ships his men are holding. Not only that, but Idris is also in cahoots with a double-dealing Arab-diplomat type named Harry Bakar, putatively a mediator between the outlaws and the International Maritime Organization.

     On top of that, there’s a fattened Texas oil heir named Billy Wynn prowling the Gulf of Aden in his luxury cruiser, indulging his military fetishism by conducting freelance espionage work with the help of Helene, an auburn-haired fashion model auditioning to be his wife. Billy has his sights trained, as do Idris and Harry, on a huge Somali-hijacked tanker whose highly combustible cargo is liquefied natural gas — and whose crew, before the hijacking, had been infiltrated by two Qaeda operatives.

     In other words, the stage is set for an elaborately interlaced web of cons, crosses, goofs and intrigues; “Djibouti,” for all its travelogue aspects and newsy urgency, is not such a departure from the Leonard template after all. Everyone’s an operator, the overall atmosphere is louche verging on alcoholic (this in a Muslim country, no less) and the principals gab, gab, gab in that meta-conscious, pop-savvy way to which Quentin Tarantino owes such a debt. (Helene reflects that Billy reminds her of Jack D. Ripper, the nutso general played by Sterling Hayden in “Dr. Strangelove”; Xavier, himself a Morgan Freeman character waiting to happen, suggests that Naomi Watts should play Dara in the feature version of their African adventure.)

     Leonard has done this sort of thing dozens of times before, and he still does it well; even in near-equatorial heat, his players keep their hepcat cool. But sometimes “Djibouti” is too cool for its own good, particularly where Dara is concerned. She’s a hard one to figure out. The nature of her curriculum vitae, along with her outdoorsy attractiveness, suggests a pious crusader in the vein of the real-life documentary filmmaker Rory Kennedy or the author and Obama policy adviser Samantha Power - someone Leonard might skewer for her earnestness and solemnity, for overly relishing the mouthfeel of the word “Darfur.”

     But Dara, intrepid though she may be, isn’t that kind of do-gooder. She registers no shock, experiences no culture-clash wobbles and evinces no sense of fear about the extraordinarily dangerous circumstances into which she’s been thrust. She provides no counterpoint, no texture; she’s another seen-it-all Leonard wiseacre who mainlines Cognac and speaks in sassy double entendres. (Beggaring our belief, Dara even starts dropping relative pronouns, saying of a particularly prolific terrorist, “I think he’s the kind keeps score.” Come on!)

     Leonard also makes a curious choice to let much of the novel’s first half unfold as a conversation between Dara and Xavier as they review their footage on her laptop: a transparently expository device that occasionally compels them to speak in predigested plot chunklets — as when Xavier says: “Now I shoot Idris changin the channel from Al Jazeera to CNN and we see a container ship flyin the Stars and Stripes. The Maersk Alabama, the first American ship, captain and crew, taken by the Somalis.”

     A result is that the story gets too slack and samey for pages at a time, stalling while the zingers volley back and forth and the waiters bring over another round of drinks. A few years back, Leonard published a slim little stylebook called “Elmore Leonard’s 10 Rules of Writing,” Rule 10 of which is “Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.” He’d have done well to heed that one.

     It’s not that Leonard, who turned 85 this month, has lost his mojo. Far from it; he also has a collection just out, Comfort to the Enemy: And Other Carl Webster Stories (Harper, paper, $14.99), that’s as sharp and economical in its storytelling as anything he’s ever done. (The book bundles two recent stories about Carl Webster, the Dust Bowl-era United States marshal who stars in Leonard’s novels “The Hot Kid” and “Up in Honey’s Room,” with a Webster novella that was first serialized in The New York Times Magazine.)

     And once “Djibouti” finally kicks into gear, it becomes a propulsive, bracingly brisk read, almost a different book. The catalyst is the emergence of an American-born Qaeda terrorist named Jama Raisuli, an African-American who converted to Islam in prison, hopped the Atlantic upon his release and has since developed into a top prospect in the bin Laden organization. Like everyone else in Leonardland, Jama is cooler than any counterpart he’d have in real life — he doesn’t do suicide bombings, he says, because “there enough boys can’t wait to go to Paradise” — but he’s as nihilistically evil as a terrorist is supposed to be: a splash of cold water on Dara and company’s floating party.

     It takes some hanging in there, but “Djibouti” winds up being a first-rate Leonard offering, one that will find you pawing your touch-screen reading device in untoward ways to find out what happens next. Just one bit of advice to the author for next time: Get shorter.

David Kamp, a contributing editor for Vanity Fair, is the author of “The United States of Arugula.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/24/books/review/Kamp-t.html?nl=books&emc=booksupdateema3&pagewanted=print

SOME WORDS ON TRUMAN CAPOTE’S WORKS, organized by Francisco Vaz Brasil

SOME WORDS ON TRUMAN CAPOTE’S WORKS

Organized by Francisco Vaz Brasil

     Truman Capote was a native of New Orleans, where he was born on September 30, 1924. His first novel, Other Voices, Other Rooms, was an international literary success when first published in 1948, and according the author a prominent place among the writers of America's postwar generation. He sustained this position subsequently with short-story collections (A Tree of Night, among others), novels and novellas (The Grass Harp and Breakfast at Tiffany's), some of the best travel writing of our time (Local Color), profiles and reportage that appeared originally in The New Yorker (The Duke in His Domain and The Muses Are Heard), a true-crime masterpiece (In Cold Blood), several short memories about his childhood in the South (A Christmas Memory, The Thanksgiving Visitor, and One Christmas), two plays (The Grass Harp and House of Flowers and two films (Beat the devil and The Innocents).

     Mr. Capote twice won the O.Henry Memorial Short Story Prize and he was a member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters. He died in August 25, 1984, shortly before his sixtieth birthday.

Books by Truman Capote

In Cold Blood

     On November 15, 1959, in the small town of Holcomb, Kansas, four members of the Clutter’s family were savagely murdered by blasts from a shotgun held a few inches from their faces. There was no apparent motive for the crime, and there were almost no clues.

     Five years, four months and twenty-nine days later, on April 14, 1965, Richard Eugene Hickock, aged thirty-three, and Perry Edward Smith, aged thirty-six, were hanged from the crime on a gallows in a warehouse in the Kansas State Penitentiary in Lansing, Kansas.

     In Cold Blood is the story of the lives and deaths of these six people. It has already been hailed as a masterpiece, a non-fictional work and became a important piece of a new American  journalism.

Other Voices, Other Rooms

     Truman Capote's novel "Other Voices, Other Rooms" opens with the main character, 13-year old Joel Harrison Knox, traveling to the home of his long-estranged father. As the book progresses, Joel becomes more intimately involved with the people of his father's household and of the larger community; there is a stress on oral history as Joel learns their stories. Overall, plot struck me as secondary to character revelation.

     The people of Joel's new world are colorful, often pathetic, and sometimes grotesque; at times it really feels like Capote is putting on a human freak show for the thrill-seeking reader. He leads us through a world of decaying old buildings and broken spirits. But Capote always respects the essential humanity of his troubled characters.

     There is a pronounced theme of alternative sexuality and/or gender identity throughout the book. Capote establishes this theme early on in his description of the main character. Joel is described as not looking like a "'real' boy": "He was too pretty, too delicate and fair-skinned." "Other Voices" thus has a lot to offer readers with an interest in gender issues as they have been explored in American literature. Capote also does an interesting job of portraying a mixed-race household where the African-American servants are as vividly drawn as the Caucasian family members.

     Throughout the book there is some richly descriptive language, as well as intriguing representations of American vernacular English. Although at times "Other Voices" seems more an exercise in style than a fully satisfying narrative, it is for me quite a remarkable coming-of-age story.

Music for Chameleons

   In these gems of reportage Truman Capote takes true stories and real people and renders then with the stylistic brio we expect from great fiction. Here we encounter an exquisitely preserved Creole aristocrat sipping absinthe in her Martinique salon; an enigmatic killer who sends his victims announcements of their forthcoming demise; and a proper Connecticut householder with a ruinous obsession for a twelve-year-old girl he has never met. And we meet Capote himself, who, whether he is smoking with his cleaning lady or trading sexual gossip with Marilyn Monroe, reminds one of the most elegant, malicious, yet compassionate writers to train his eye on the social fauna of our time.

The Complete Stories by Truman Capote

     The common perception of Capote (who died in 1984) is that he had a brilliant early beginning to a career that eventually fizzled out in drug use and soured celebrity. His "new nonfiction" book, In Cold Blood (1966), the true story of a Kansas murder told with great fictional technique and elan, is generally regarded as his finest achievement.

     But now, for the first time, all of Capote's short stories are being published together, an event that signifies a renewed appreciation of his overall contribution to literature, for evidence is presented in this one volume that he should be ranked as a major American short story writer.

     By instinct, he produced the amalgam of fact and fiction that became In Cold Blood; similarly but contrarily, by instinct he wrote short stories always intent on maintaining the form's integrity as distinct from the novel.

     Most of Capote's short story work was concentrated in the early years of his career, the 1940s, but his capacity for writing deeply thought-out, deeply felt stories continued into the 1980s, from the first story in the collection, "The Walls Are Cold," a short, entertaining piece about a young, flirtatious socialite, to the last story, "One Christmas," set in the Alabama and New Orleans of his boyhood, a story conjured from the heart--but free of overripe sentiment - about learning the differences in how people love. Both a broadening of theme and deepening in treatment are observable when the stories in the collection are read in order; all of them are linked by a shimmering, but never showy, eloquence and sensitive observation of the personal environments his characters inhabit, both psychological and physical.

Answered Prayers

    "A gift from an unbridled genius. Exciting...irresistible...should be cherished as top-flight work from a master." -- Los Angeles Times Book Review.

     Although Truman Capote's last novel was unfinished at the time of his death, its surviving portions offer a devastating group portrait of the high and low society of his time.

     As it follows the career of a writer of uncertain parentage and omnivorous erotic tastes, Answered Prayers careens from a louche bar in Tangiers to a banquette at La Cote Basque, from literary salons to high-priced whorehouses. It takes in calculating beauties and sadistic husbands along with such real-life supporting characters as Colette, the Duchess of Windsor, Montgomery Clift, and Tallulah Bankhead. Above all, this malevolently funny book displays Capote at his most relentlessly observant and murderously witty.

The grass harp

     Set on the outskirts of a small Southern town, The Grass Harp tells the story of three endearing misfits--an orphaned boy and two whimsical old ladies--who one day take up residence in a tree house. AS they pass sweet yet hazardous hours in a china tree, The Grass Harp manages to convey all the pleasures and responsibilities of freedom. But most of all it teaches us about the sacredness of love, "that love is a chain of love, as nature is a chain of life."

    This volume also includes Capote's A Tree of Night and Other Stories, which the Washington Post called "unobstrusively beautiful...a superlative book."

Portraits and Observations – The Essays of Truman Capote

     This volume of collected essays, many out of print since their original publication, is both a long overdue and welcome addition to the Capote revival. It's arranged chronologically—from a short 1946 piece on New Orleans, written when Capote was 22, to a brief appreciation of Willa Cather he wrote the day before he died in 1984.

     The 42 pieces range from one-page portraits of public figures such as Ezra Pound and Coco Chanel to the 104-page 1956 The Muses Are Heard, a masterful journalistic account, first printed in the New Yorker, of an American opera company's tour of Porgy and Bess in the U.S.S.R.

     The collection contains some great writing—his 1970s Handcarved Coffins, an account of a Midwestern murder that recalls In Cold Blood and can be savored for its beautifully nuanced balance of empathy and emotional horror. Many of the pieces, however, such as a 1974 sketch of Elizabeth Taylor written for Ladies' Home Journal, feel occasional and off-the-cuff.

     While integral to Capote and his evolution as a writer, these pieces do not constitute his best work. Still, the volume's completeness will recommend it to fans as well as anyone seriously interested in mid–20th-century American literature.

A House on the Heights

     The tranquil life Truman Capote led in the quiet enclave of Brooklyn Heights in the 1950s and 1960s stood in sharp contrast to the glittering scene he adored in Manhattan. Intimate and wry, A House on the Heights vividly evokes the neighborhood that Capote came to know well and described as one of Brooklyn’s “splendid contradictions.” Its denizens, including a celebrated Russian spy, a globe-trotting antiquarian, and a cat-rescuing dowager with a pointed social agenda bring to life the Brooklyn that cast its spell over Capote. In A House on the Heights he meanders through a special time and place still recognizable today.

Too Brief a Treat: The Letters of Truman Capote

     Considering Truman Capote's fabled social life, one would think that his private letters would be dripping with juicy gossip. Indeed, with correspondents and friends that included Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Lee Radziwill, Cecil Beaton, Christopher Isherwood, David O. Selznick, Tennessee Williams, Audrey Hepburn and Richard Avedon, these bright, energetic missives do include an occasional tasty tidbit.

     But as candid as Capote can be, one ultimately gets the sense that the author always knew his letters would be read by a wider audience some day, and rarely does Capote express less than bubbling enthusiasm and childlike devotion to his correspondents.

     It's up to Clarke, Capote's biographer, to fill in the occasionally sordid blanks, which he does in chapter intros and extensive footnotes. Much more profound than any gossip is the humor, sensitivity and ambition with which Capote seems to have approached every experience in his life. and his incredible discipline and passion for writing, spending hours sequestered in some of the world's most glamorous locations, composing the stories and books.

     This entertaining collection gives us a firsthand account of Capote's journey as he comes into his own as an artist, charting his gradual but inevitable transformation into a literary and society superstar.

     Readers who want to know more about the real Capote will pick up the author's books (which include In Cold Blood and Breakfast at Tiffany's) and continue to revel in his wise and whimsical prose.

Summer Crossing: A Novel

     Capote's novel shows the promise of a future master; Campbell's interpretation shows the promise of a good reader. Campbell is better at narration than dialogue as her efforts to differentiate characters, especially males, are forced, and much of her reading is flat or breathy. But she handles some of Capote's best writing with a range and flare that bode well for future audios.

     Capote told everyone he'd destroyed his earliest effort (produced at age 19), but it recently turned up at Sotheby's, handwritten in four ruled school notebooks. The plot is thin and the characters weak. With her Fifth Avenue Protestant parents off in Europe, 17-year-old Grady rebels by intensifying an affair with and quickly marrying a parking lot attendant from a dysfunctional Brooklyn Jewish family. She soon finds herself pregnant and wallows in regret.

     But there are glimpses of Capote's signature style that emerged only four years later in Other Voices, Other Rooms, and a hint of Breakfast at Tiffany's' Holly Golightly in the character of Grady McNeil. For Capote mavens—or those whose interest has been piqued by the movie—Summer Crossing is worth a listen.

Some Quotes

"Truman Capote is the most perfect writer of my generation." - Norman Mailer

“A must-have treasure for Capote fans . . . These are delicious, dramatic, and tender nonfiction portraits and tales.” – NPR’s Morning Edition

“A wonderful volume . . . Nearly every page can be read with real pleasure. . . . No matter what his subject, [Capote’s] canny, careful art gives it warm and breathing life”  – The Washington Post Book World

“Every piece is a treasure. . . . Pages and pages of remarkably evocative, careful and well-observed prose [delineate,] in a measured and elegant manner, one of the most remarkable American literary lives of the twentieth century.”  – Jane Smiley, Los Angeles Times Book Review.

I am a Truman Capote works fan. I hope you sometime read one of his books and if possible watch one of the movies based in his works, like A Christmas Memory, Breakfast at Tiffany's (Above Audrey Hepburn, main character), In Cold Blood and Infamous. Let's go?!