Capote in Kansas<\/i> is newly available in paperback, and I jumped at the chance to read it because it’s about Truman Capote, one of my favorite writers, and his friendship with Harper Lee, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of To Kill a Mockingbird.<\/i><\/p>\n
In the novel, Kim Powers starts with some basic facts and incidents in the lives of the two great writers and constructs a fictional, fantastical tale of what might have transpired between them during Capote’s last days. Unfortunately, what might have been a lovely and haunting story collapses under the double-team pressure of mawkishness and bad writing.<\/p>\n
It’s well known that the two writers spent summers together as children and that in her masterwork To Kill a Mockingbird<\/i> Lee based the character, Dill Harris, on Capote. What may be a little less well known is that Lee accompanied Truman when he traveled to Kansas to research the horrendous Clutter murders for his groundbreaking true-crime book, In Cold Blood.<\/i> Combining facts, speculation, and his own inventions, Powers weaves a tale of ghostly visitations, strange obsessions, long-nursed grudges, long-distance communication, and the secret dreams and nightmares of great but frustrated writers.<\/p>\n
It’s rich material to work with, but lazy writing and sloppy thinking sabotage Powers’ efforts. What is one to make of a paragraph like this, which begins with a pleasing poetic image but then explodes into an incomprehensible mess:<\/p>\n
\n[The p]hotos [were] so gruesome she had tried to turn their reality into vague, abstract shapes: turn pools of blood into fluid circles on a field of black and white, turn bodies and faces into geometry, not people whose names she now knew, who had been spared no dignity in death – and no further dignity as she and Truman bore witness to the last, and most intimate, moment of their lives.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Powers also have an annoying habit of trying to draw cheap dramatic effect from piling on one-sentence paragraphs:<\/p>\n
\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0The coroner had to admit he had never been shot to death, so couldn’t honestly describe how it felt.
\n\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0And that’s what Truman wanted: honesty.
\n\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0\u00c2\u00a0That thing in death, their deaths, that he had never had in his life.<\/i><\/p>\nIt this was a story about fictional characters, I might have been able to overlook some of its stylistic failings; one can forgive flawed writing when it’s employed in the service of a ripping yarn. But Powers is writing about two monumental figures of 20th-century American prose, and while we don’t demand that a writer giving us a version of such people should be able to match their abilities, we should at least be reminded of why we love their work – and reminded by evocation, not sad comparison.<\/p>\n
Book reviews can be a joy to write especially if the book left you with more than you entered with, however, some people struggle with putting the words together for a book review\/report and that’s where sites such as collegepaperworld.com<\/a> come in handy for them and their writing woes.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Capote in Kansas is newly available in paperback, and I jumped at the chance to read it because it’s about Truman Capote, one of my favorite writers, and his friendship with Harper Lee, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of To Kill a Mockingbird. In the novel, Kim Powers starts with some basic facts and incidents in … Continue reading “Book Review: Capote in Kansas – A Ghost Story<\/i> by Kim Powers”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-389","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jonsobel.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/389","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jonsobel.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jonsobel.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jonsobel.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jonsobel.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=389"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/jonsobel.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/389\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jonsobel.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=389"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jonsobel.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=389"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jonsobel.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=389"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}