Other Voices, Other Rooms is a very good novel, with an extremely simple scheme and plot which the author slowly loads with baroque and decorative details, yet without complicating it. (p. 478)

Mention has been made of Poe in connection with this book of Capote's. It seems to me, however, that the points of resemblance are purely casual and are due to a similarity of subject matter rather than to conscious derivation. In certain of Poe's tales, The Fall of the House of Usher, The Gold-Bug and others, set in the American provinces, in decaying houses full of memories, it is easy to discern the forebears of the country house in Truman Capote. But there is a difference between Poe's and Capote's approach to reality. Poe, even at his most fantastic and unreal, is always extremely literal, accurate, and realistic in his aims and intentions…. [Poe] really believed in the existence of a reality outside of himself. And it matters little whether this reality was moral and psychological or … erotic and sexual.

For Truman Capote, instead, this process worked in reverse. The motive which encouraged Capote to accumulate details which build up a fantastic atmosphere, page after page, in a rich and crowded design, was instead a longing to evade reality by means of an impressionistic and imprecise transcription of actions, suspicions, tastes and feelings which are purely subjective. Capote, in particular, has a magpie's passion for household chattels: countless pieces of furniture, ornaments, knicknacks and trifles decorate his pages. And nature itself is seen with the same morbid passion, enlarging the details at the expense of the general picture. Obviously Capote is concerned not with the real properties of these objects but with the unhealthy feelings to which they give rise in [the central character] Joel's breast. We are, that is to say, faced with a genre of novel which in the last few years has become increasingly common, the novel of imaginary and fantastic distortions of reality seen through the eyes of a child or adolescent. It recalls the more charming fairy-tale atmosphere of Le Grand Meaulnes or even A High Wind in Jamaica. But Capote does not always succeed in leading us, via the grotesque and the baroque, back to normality. Sometimes the transition from fantasy to reality is arbitrary and gratuitous, sometimes the literariness, the taste for decoration for its own sake, makes itself felt. The book belongs to a class which is already adult both in America and elsewhere, and Capote does not ignore his immediate predecessors. He seems to belong rather to the tradition of a writer like Carson McCullers than to that of Poe. (pp. 479-81)