{"id":77,"date":"2005-09-27T22:06:00","date_gmt":"2005-09-27T22:06:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bookblog.salticid.com\/?p=77"},"modified":"2025-06-28T12:46:27","modified_gmt":"2025-06-28T16:46:27","slug":"truman-capote","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/2005\/09\/truman-capote\/","title":{"rendered":"Truman Capote"},"content":{"rendered":"

Conversations with Capote<\/em> – Laurence Grobel, 1985
In Cold Blood: A True Account of a Multiple Murder and Its Consequences<\/em> – Truman Capote, 1965<\/p>\n

Jonathan played a Capote type in a play this summer (Southern Fried Murder), so I dug up my Conversations with Capote<\/em>, which I remembered enjoying for its snarkiness (the same way I enjoy Lord Gnome’s Literary Companion<\/em>). I did read the whole thing but am promptly getting rid of it. Capote comes across as a really miserable man, nasty because he’s unhappy and unhappy because he’s nasty. His huge ego and his vicious put-downs both seem to come from bottomless insecurity—or maybe it’s just because he’s stoned out of his gourd all the time. Sad, sad, sad.<\/p>\n

However, I’d never read In Cold Blood<\/em>, widely considered a masterpiece. Capote certainly writes clearly and well, and I can see that it was a groundbreaking work at the time (it’s been described as “the first non-fiction novel”). But some works of art, important because they were seminal, can be unremarkable divorced from their context, and that’s how In Cold Blood<\/em> struck me. To its credit, the book doesn’t have the prurience that often taints true crime, and it’s well-structured. But a masterpiece? Where’s the sense of larger context, the transcendence that can imbue a story of this scope? It didn’t make me think or feel as much as the great non-fiction writers of today do in a brief essay. Sorry, Truman!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Conversations with Capote – Laurence Grobel, 1985In Cold Blood: A True Account of a Multiple Murder and Its Consequences – Truman Capote, 1965 Jonathan played a Capote type in a play this summer (Southern Fried Murder), so I dug up my Conversations with Capote, which I remembered enjoying for its snarkiness (the same way I […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-77","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/77","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=77"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/77\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4720,"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/77\/revisions\/4720"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=77"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=77"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.salticid.com\/bookblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=77"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}