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.
