Finished reading my second Capote – there’s no Moon River in the book, no Mickey Rooney in “yellowface”. If you’ve seen the movie, it’s a very loose interpretation.  The major plot points are the same, with enough variation to change the mood of the story completely in translation from book to film.  The film seemed hokey to me when I saw it in high school, but you may note that I am not an Audrey Hepburn fan.  (I prefer Kate).  The book, however, did not feel contrived or silly to me.  The story is about friendship, or throwing away the one thing you find too late that you really needed all along.  

Two out of two for TC.  Did someone say genius?

Truman Capote wrote Other Voices, Other Rooms when he was twenty-one.  I never did manage to finish his most famous work, In Cold Blood, but OVOR was easy because it was enjoyable.  Reading it felt like childhood, the way I felt reading The Little Friend by Donna Tarrt.  It evokes the languished Southern summers I remember, the New Orleans I once met, the native southerners I have known.  I finished this book in a single humid afternoon sipping from a pitcher of mint julep (sans the mint) on the bedside table.

The friendship between Joel and Idabel, in particular, reminds me of my cousin and I.  When we were elementary school BFFs, I’d make him play barbies and in return I’d have to play hot wheels; but mostly we skinned our knees, climbed rocks, played cops & robbers on rusty dumptrucks, crashed a tandem bike on loose gravel, helped grandma with the garden planting, shared superman ice cream, hung the flypaper for rummage sales, hid and sought, ran together from our bully of a cousin four years our senior…and then we grew up.  He became cool and I became awkward.  Twenty years later, he’s got 2.5 kids, a six-figure job and a vacation home.  Twenty years later, I’m not sure where I’ll be living 3 months from now, am still trying to write the next great American novel and have only (relatively) recently found someone I intend to happily spend the rest of my life with.  My cousin and I, we are nothing alike, but we’re still more alike than anyone else in our family.  There’s a kind of relief we each have in common at our withdrawal from the family drama: of twenty-plus cousins, we are the only two who left.  He and I communicate through our parents, our grandma.  We each ask about the other but never seem to think we’ve got enough in common to talk directly to one another.  This is the sadness of growing up: we develop a kind of self-consciousness that hinders us from really knowing people as well as we might.  We reserve our openness for very few people.  Other Voices, Other Rooms explores the kind of profound loneliness we have all felt at least once.

Rabbit trails aside, Capote’s first novel is about a child who goes looking for a place he belongs, and finds that where he belongs is the place he least expects to, and least intends to.  That he can survive in the throes of a household of broken people convinces him that he can survive in any way he chooses to, himself broken or not.

Capote also includes his own “what is art?” statement, via the following bit of dialogue:

The feeble-minded, the neurotic, the criminal, perhaps, also, the artist, have unpredictability and perverted innocence in common…Let’s compare them to a Chinese chest: the sort, you remember, that opens into a second box, another, atill another, until at length you come upon the last…the latch is touched, the lid springs open to reveal…what unsuspected cache?…[senseless, pointless, violent action] is the kind of thing that happens when you tamper with the smallest box.

All of the characters in this book have a single thing in common: they have an inability to love in a socially sanctioned way.  Their isolation is both a result of their particular “flaws” and an outcome of attempting to find love despite them.  In a way, the coming of the child Joel Harrison Knox to Skully’s Landing is the coming of a savior, an unloved isolated child who manages to transcend his losses and thereby bring hope to the devastated household.