Book Report: In Cold Blood by Truman Capote (with Bonus Lovecraft!)
The Book: In Cold Blood by Truman Capote (1965)
The Goods: Generally credited as the origin of the true crime genre, In Cold Blood is a Truman Capote’s non-fiction novel detailing the grisly 1959 murders of the Clutter family in Holcomb, Kansas, as well as Capote’s study of the two killers.
The Report: Despite the face that we’re living in an age awash with all things true crime, book club was impressed with In Cold Blood, and found the experience of reading it chilling and a little creepy. Nonetheless, many of us found it impossible to discuss this novel without discussing how it was written: Capote’s methods, his interpretation of the events, and his relationship to the real-life killers.
Thoughts about the book from our collective book club brain…
Whose story is this? By and large, we found Capote’s pacing and nearly insufferable attention to the details of the Clutters’ lives in early part of the novel to be super effective in evoking dread. We also found the back stories he related about the killers, Dick Hickok and Perry Smith, to be very compelling. But many of us were less-than-comfortable with the narrative at the end of the novel, which seemed preoccupied with Capote’s psychological interpretation about why the killers did what they did as well as the shortcomings of the justice system. At the end of the novel, we wondered: whose story is this, anyway?
Well, it’s Capote’s story, in many ways. Despite the fact that he doesn’t appear in the novel, Capote is all over the place, making choices and controlling the narrative. We all found places in the novel where we sort of had ‘gotcha’ moments, realizing that Capote was making a dramatic choice, or investing a character with a certain motivation, etc. In particularly, we pointed to the expectation that Capote created about which of the killers pulled the trigger/made the decision to start killing (I won’t disclose this here in case any of gentle readers haven’t read the novel yet), only to disclose a long way into the novel the truth – a strong narrative choice that points to just how strongly controlled the novel is.
Shocking. We wondered, at length, about how shocking this novel would have been to read when it was first published (or even when it was serialized in The New Yorker). It seems as if In Cold Blood was published at a crossroads in American culture: a cold-blooded murder in the heartland of the country six years before it was published, and the Helter Skelter of the late sixties just a few years away. In our world of Dateline NBC, everything is shocking, and so not much seems shocking in the way that In Cold Blood must have felt (although, certainly, plenty of crimes seem disconcerting and tragic).
Capote Vs. Infamous. Nearly everyone had seen Capote (2005), starring Philip Seymour Hoffman as Capote and Catherine Keener as Harper Lee (and all agreed: it’s a great movie). But a few of us made a strong case that nobody should pass over Infamous (2006), with Toby Jones as the writer (appropriately short for the role, especially as compared to Hoffman), Sandra Bullock as Harper Lee and a knockout, charged performance from Daniel Craig as Perry Smith. I was truly not alone in thinking that Bullock made an absolutely fetching Harper Lee.
Fine Linkage of George and Truman: Our host sent along this very insightful George Plimpton interview with Truman Capote from 1996.
Hey, It’s a Bonus H.P. Lovecraft Story!
As were were meeting in Red Hook for book cub this month (and just a few days after Halloween), we decided to throw in a bonus: the 1925 short story, “The Horror at Red Hook” by H.P. Lovecraft. It’s kind of a terrible story, but I include it here because it was hilariously terrible: full of overblown descriptions of the evil underbelly of the Red Hook neighborhood and rampant racist and xenophobic descriptions of the cultish evil-worshipping inhabitants of said neighborhood. Yet, for those of familiar with that area of Brooklyn, it was kind of a hoot to read Lovecraft’s descriptions of streets and alleys that were never as dirty as he imagined (and certainly not evil) and are rapidly gentrifying now.
It was also fun to introduce book club to the tentacled phenomenon of Lovecraft’s Cthulhu. As a super bonus for this post, I’d like to share a photo I snapped at a convention a few years ago of a homemade Pokethulhu model. Cute! Tentacled! Demonic! (I admit that I didn’t write down who actually made this model, but if you’re reading this and the model below is your Pokethulhu, let me know!)
Next up: A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith! I’m sure there will be less killing and demons...
