Content area
Full Text
VOSS, RALPH F. Truman Capote and the 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 Capote's important novel In Cold Blood, Ralph F. Voss offers a wide-ranging study of Capote's work that will appeal to Capote scholars as well as to general readers interested in Capote's novel, its roots in Capote's own colorful life, and its ongoing importance to American culture in the intervening half century. Voss's book proves especially strong as he offers a contrarian view to the prevailing sense of Capote as originator of "the nonfiction novel," suggesting that Capote's work more importantly draws on other currents in the 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 Capote's "legacy in Kansas" as he tracks the continued effects in the present day of In Cold Blood on the lives of the Kansans-turned-characters in Capote's pages.
For Voss, any understanding of Capote's In Cold Blood necessarily roots itself in what he calls "Capote's ruinous celebrity" (14), and Voss's work retraces with aplomb the now-familiar narratives of Capote's troubled life as a youth, his emergence into the circles of New York literati and of the gay subcultures of the city, his meteoric rise to fame in print and in the film adaptations of Breakfast at Tiffany's and In Cold Blood, and his gradual but flashy...