Truman Capote and the Legacy of In Cold Blood by Ralph F. Voss (review)

Abstract

VOSS, RALPH F. Truman Capote and Legacy of In Cold Blood. Tuscaloosa, Alabama: University of Alabama Press, 2011.246 pp. $34.95. In what is a highly readable, engaging study of Truman important novel In Cold Blood, Ralph F. Voss offers a wide-ranging study of work that will appeal to Capote scholars as well as to general readers interested in its roots in own colorful life, and its ongoing importance to American in intervening half century. Voss's book proves especially strong as he offers a contrarian view to prevailing sense of Capote as originator of the nonfiction novel, suggesting that work more importantly draws on other currents in writing of historical novels and of true crime fiction rather than innovating a new subgenre in its own right. Finally, Voss offers an interesting and, for Capote scholars, indispensable update to what he calls legacy in Kansas as he tracks continued effects in present day of In Cold Blood on lives of Kansans-turned-characters in pages. For Voss, any understanding of In Cold Blood necessarily roots itself in what he calls Capote's ruinous (14), and Voss's work retraces with aplomb now-familiar narratives of troubled life as a youth, his emergence into circles of New York literati and of gay subcultures of city, his meteoric rise to fame in print and in film adaptations of Breakfast at Tiffany's and In Cold Blood, and his gradual but flashy decline as a writer through travel, excess, and increasing personal and artistic turmoil. In depicting these phases of life and career, Voss acknowledges his obvious debt to Gerald Clarke's Capote (1988), considered landmark biography of Capote, and to George Plimpton's Too Briefa Treat (2004), and it is true that he draws heavily on these two writers in initial pages of his book. Still, Voss demonstrates very successfully how In Cold Blood was enabled and emboldened in its scope and ambition by very courting of celebrity that defined life and ultimately destroyed it. Once Voss moves more solidly into his own contentions about style and in particular to his assertion that much-heralded invention of nonfiction novel represents a kind of evolution or, more accurately, a kind of reinvention (99) of older forms of historical novel and of true crime fiction, Voss's argument gathers particular strength, bolstered by his own copious research of New York Public Library's Truman Capote Papers. For Voss, In Cold Blood derives in large part from grounding in Southern Gothic tradition of writing, an attribute only accentuated by collaboration with Harper Lee during research and writing of his especially given Southern Gothic characteristics so prominently on display in Lee's own novel To Kill a Mockingbird. For Voss, treatment of Holcomb, Kansas, as a sleepy town thrust abruptly and irrevocably into modern sense of malaise that accompanies such a grisly murder--here, a killing not just of Clutter family but of a whole community's (perhaps false) sense of security--cannot be separated from Southern Gothic's own frequent recourse to sometimes-violent crumbling and decay of antebellum culture and its lingering romantic nostalgia (47). …