[Truman Capote says of writing:] "A writer ought to have all his colors, all his abilities available on the same palette for mingling…. But how?"

"Music for Chameleons," a miscellany of stories, reportage, an extended crime narrative and a few autobiographical snippets, is the result of a search for an answer to that question. The search is described by the author as both perilous and exhausting…. All the more troubling, therefore, to report that the book is disappointing.

The longest piece of writing, "Handcarved Coffins: A Nonfiction Account of an American Crime," is a rambling chronicle of Mr. Capote's friendship and conversations, literary and nonliterary, with Jake Pepper of the State Bureau of Investigation, who suspects a rich rancher of committing multiple murders. Rarely in its length do we explore the interior either of a criminal or of a threatened innocent or man of law. And the experimental dimension seems negligible, amounting only to the periodic interruption of conventional first-person prose by patches of dialogue laid out as though in a film script or play….

Roughly the same failings surface in the fiction and journalism—authorial claims of hard-won breakthroughs, little supporting evidence…. The new fictional style is … flat, perfunctory and bored with itself—witness a piece of grotesque about a Connecticut Jane Austen fancier whose deepfreeze is "filled with stacks of frozen, perfectly preserved cats" (the dead pets of her past).

The "new" journalistic style appears in accounts of an afternoon with Marilyn Monroe and a morning with a Manhattan cleaning woman and consists once more of conventional first-person prose interrupted by patches of (exceedingly arch) conversation printed as in a film script….

There's nothing mysterious about Capote's decision, at this point in his literary career, to insist on his identity as an experimenter grimly gambling his way thorugh creative chaos in pursuit of new shapes and idioms….

The disquiet I felt on reading "Music for Chameleons" was rather different from that which sub-par performances by accomplished writers usually inspire. The book left an impression of veiled scorn for the standards and values of those for whose hospitable welcome the author now bids on returning to letters from the world of publicity. And that impression is directly traceable, I think, to the unearned use of the language of deep esthetic commitment.

I don't deny that here and there in these pages humor leavens the toploftiness, condescension and melodramatized dedication. There is even a moment of sober self-critique….

But still the misgivings multiply. Their source, as I say, is the author's pretense that all one needs to do, in order to repossess oneself of the ambition of an artist and the scrupulosity of a craftsman, is to assert that one has thus repossessed oneself. No sweat; it's as easy as opening an umbrella in a summer shower. Simply tap out, on typewriter keys, "creative chaos," "experiment," "grim gambles," "hundreds of pages," "dark madness," and there you are, made whole again, peer of the truly consecrated poet engaged in the truly lonely struggle. In his best days Truman Capote stood at a remove from such fearful cynicism. May those days soon return.