There is nothing [in Breakfast at Tiffany's] for anybody in search of a "major" novelist but at his best, Capote is very, very good, as is illustrated by the fragment called "A Christmas Memory" which appears at the end of this collection…. It is full of kitchen smells and tastes, of outdoor excursions to gather nuts and holly, of the world of things and of childlike human warmth. One is tempted to quote, but it is contrived of so many small touches that one would be obliged to quote it all to convey its whole flavor. It is nostalgic but the observation never blurs or softens, it is affectionate but never sentimental. It is also very funny. One would like it to go on and on but it soon stops. The public image of the author, wan and recumbent, comes to mind and one is grateful that he has found the energy to write this much.

On the other hand, there is the "short novel" which gives this book its title. I think it is fair to assume that it is intended as a study of character, one Holly Golightly, a young lady of nineteen with some fairly free and easy attitudes towards the world….

We have met Miss Golightly before. Christopher Isherwood has written of her, or someone so like her that it makes no difference…. She is the romantic adolescent's projection of the ideal woman who will make no demands on anybody's manhood. Having divested herself of desirability for the fastidious by her declared promiscuity, she can remain just a good chum as she strolls across the room stark naked. Capote writes of her with rapt admiration….

In structure and plan, this story is curiously reminiscent of Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby. Aside from the effect achieved by the prose, which is at once stylish, detached and colloquial, aside from the unabashed use of theatrical device, a startling parallel may be drawn between the two central characters. Both have cloaked their pasts in elaborate fantasies. Having done many things for which they might be called to account, both are tripped up ironically by something they didn't do. Both are betrayed by love. The great difference is that Fitzgerald was constantly scratching away at the surface, revealing the horror and emptiness below; for Capote, the surface is everything…. As a consequence, his story is never more than clever entertainment, as entertaining, say, as something tossed off by Somerset Maugham, though he lacks too, perhaps, that foxy grandpa's popular touch. (p. 23)

"Childlike," but not "childish," is the essential word in any discussion of Capote's work. His naïve enthusiasm for Holly Golightly is the child's enthusiasm for the mysterious adult world. (pp. 23-4)

Truman Capote is no genius, despite the manner of his presentation ten years ago, but his music, when in tune, is clear and lovely and I hope that it will still be heard long after Holly Golightly has been forgotten. (p. 24)