Other Voices, Other Rooms

Other Voices, Other Rooms by Truman Capote

Reviewed by Gerti

I read Truman Capote’s “In Cold Blood” many years ago, and knew him to be a very talented writer, perhaps even, as Norman Mailer said, “the most perfect writer of my generation.” Unlike that book, however, Capote’s first novel, “Other Voices, Other Rooms” is an imperfect masterpiece, Mona Lisa in a tube top. Some of the writing is clever and tight, but other chapters, especially near the end, are meandering messes that sorely needed the eye and pen of a good editor.

The book details the life of 12-year-old Joel Knox who goes to the deep South to live with his father after Joel’s mother dies. His father lives in a decaying old plantation called Skully’s Landing, a name filled with foreboding and menace, which the place lives up to. Even after his adventure-filled trip there, Joel has to wait a long while to see his father, who is in a sort of coma. His father’s caretakers as well as gatekeepers are Joel’s stepmother Amy and his uncle Randolph. Like a character from Thomas Harris’ “Silence of the Lambs”, Uncle Randolph flounces around the novel, painting, singing and telling sad stories to young Joel while wearing costumes from La Cage aux Folles. Amy is a bit of a tyrant who comes unhinged occasionally, especially after the house servant leaves. The sanest people at the house are the servants, Missouri “Zoo” Fever and her father, Jesus, an aged man who dies before the end of the novel, setting off Zoo’s disastrous exodus to Washington, D.C.

Capote excels when writing descriptions, like that of hero Joel and his friends, Isabel and Florabel Thompkins, one of whom is Joel’s love interest. In fact all the characters in the book are refreshingly quirky, even the people who drive trucks and run rib restaurants that Joel spends just a little time with. It’s the plot and character motivations which are the weakness in this book. It is a bildungsroman, as Joel grows up during the course of the book, finding not only his long-lost father, but his own sexuality as he tries to decide between romancing Idabel, a tomboy his own age, and Miss Wisteria, a midget who sees in Joel her only chance at love with a creature nearly her size. And of course there is the underlying sexual tension between Uncle Randolph and Joel, but Capote doesn’t go there in this book, and the homosexual urges remains unfulfilled.

In OVOR, Capote brings forward a familiar theme in his writing, one he would use again in “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” and “In Cold Blood”, which is that things happen in life that separate us irrevocably from our past and the people who dwell there, and while we can think fondly about it, we really can’t return. Holly Golightly can never go back to being Lulamae Barnes after she’s lived in New York, and the Clutter family killers can never go back to a time before the murders. Even though Joel Knox returns to his father, his father is not really a father to him, and in fact wanders away from the plantation at the end of the book. Joel leaves his illusions and his childhood behind him. I wish there were more here than just quirky people stuck in unusual places, but there is no real salvation here for Joel, who ends stronger, but more alone at the end of the book than he ever was before.