Inasmuch as [Truman Capote] has produced a number of works that continue to be read, studied, and discussed, he must be regarded as one of the more significant writers of the second half of this century. Undoubtedly, Other Voices, Other Rooms, A Tree of Night and Other Stories, Breakfast at Tiffany's, and In Cold Blood, his best works, will have reader appeal for a very long time and will remain influential for other writers.

Some reviewers criticized Capote's fiction prior to In Cold Blood for its unrealistic characters, fanciful plots, and its indifference to moral and societal issues. Still, there are critics who find those same qualities praiseworthy, commenting that Capote's stories develop from the historical conventions of the romance. (pp. 6-7)

Readers who accept the idea that Capote's early writing should be categorized as romance can then dismiss irrelevant issues. They are the people who find Capote's second book remarkable in its voyage into the human psyche via the route of the romance. A Tree of Night and Other Stories is like a heavily woven tapestry of different depths that draws one from layer to layer. The collection contains stories in both a light and dark mode. Although Capote was never again to publish stories of the latter kind, some of the characteristics appear in other works, and some of the characters surface under other names in the fiction of the past decade. (p. 7)

American literature in the thirties and forties was dominated by social consciousness. The preferred fiction was sociological prose, much of it naturalistic. Thus, when Other Voices, Other Rooms was published soon after World War II, it was criticized as being out of the main stream. Within a decade, however, as other young writers gained renown, it became apparent that Capote's novel was a piece of a new pattern in fiction, one that was described by terms such as narcissistic, grotesque, symbolic, and aesthetic. (p. 13)

Unlike Faulkner or Tate, [Capote] is not concerned with the destruction of a region, the downfall of a class, or the decay of a family. His first novel, as well as those that succeed it, is narrower in scope than theirs…. Undeniably, Other Voices, Other Rooms belongs to the Southern gothic mode, but it is much more than a baroque fiction. The novelist has combined elements of gothicism with both a Southern setting and Southern characters. The work has mystery and suspense, terror and horror, heavily textured description, strange episodes and people, and psychological and symbolic elements of the gothic. A decaying Southern mansion far removed from ordinary life provides the setting for characters so different from the norm that they are grotesque. But there is purpose in Capote's creation.

The major theme of the novel is homosexuality, a topic considered taboo in American work prior to the advent of contemporary fiction. When the subject did appear in the past, it was usually carefully masked. Capote, however, uses no disguises other than symbols, dreams, and images as he tells the story of a thirteen-year-old boy who becomes an innocent victim of an inescapable fate. In the course of the novel, [Joel] develops into a tragic figure as he is drawn toward the encapsulated world of the homosexual. (pp. 13-14)

[The] Southern gothic world in which Joel becomes entrapped forces him to discover one self, one voice, one room that will imprison him forever. The other Joels that might-have-been are deterministically eliminated as he journeys from the real world of a thirteen-year-old into a surrealistic nightmare from which he can awaken only into another kind of unreality. Joel is an innocent, a victim of people and events over which he has no control. (p. 14)

At thirteen Joel is in an amorphous stage. Having reached the end of childhood he must cross the threshold into adulthood. But Joel has an uncertain masculinity…. Having known only the feminine world of his mother and his aunt, he views the masculine world as mysterious and magical, equating it with abnormal strength and power. He is possessed of many fears, fear of hidden enemies, fear of humiliation, fear of pain, fear of loss and loneliness. These mitigate his desire to escape the sterile future of Skully's Landing for the reality of an existence which has shown him enemies, humiliation, pain, loss, and loneliness. (pp. 20-1)

All things have prepared [Joel for his fate]: loss, fear, loneliness, disaster, deception, desertion. Randolph's encircling web cannot be escaped unless Joel wills it, and he does not…. Overwhelmed by the most intense loneliness he has ever known, even more than that of his first afternoon at Skully's Landing, he hears a bell toll in his head. The summer and boyhood that are ending become the "was," "gone," and "dead" of the autumn woods. Words of finality are brought together with images of the coming winter, sterility, frigidity, and death. (pp. 24-5)

Because of the distinctly different types of fiction Capote wrote in the first decade of his career, for the purpose of discussion critics divided his work into two large categories: the sunny or daylight stories, and the dark or nocturnal ones. The sunlight stories are often comic, somewhat realistic, and sometimes sentimental. The nighttime stories are concerned with a world of dreams and nightmares, gothics and grotesques, aberration and evil. The daylight stories are generally told as first-person narrative and move from the narrator to the outer world, whereas the dark stories have a third-person narrator and move to the inner world of the characters. Not only the short fiction but also the lengthier works follow this pattern. (p. 27)

Of the daylight stories in the collection [A Tree of Night and Other Stories], "Children on Their Birthdays" is the most familiar and one of the most popular of all Capote's pieces. It was written the same year that Other Voices, Other Rooms was published, 1948, thus illustrating the divided stream of Capote's talent. Although the reader can discern some similarities between the two works, more obvious links are to be found between the short story and Breakfast at Tiffany's and The Grass Harp: a young man gives an eye-witness account of the events, but almost nothing is known about him in "Children on Their Birthdays," for he does not appear to be a participant in the action as are the young writer in Breakfast at Tiffany's and Collin Fenwick in The Grass Harp. The plot and setting are realistic and the characters have none of the grotesque qualities we associate with the dark works. "Children on Their Birthdays" has a tender tonal quality that recalls both Breakfast at Tiffany's and The Grass Harp. (p. 55)

The struggle between innocent naturalness and restrictive societal values is basic to the meaning of The Grass Harp. Although in the long run the rules of society prevail, it is not as if goodness is defeated by a corrupt force. Rather, it is the recognition that compromise is necessary for the continuity of a community. Thus, over a brief period of time, all the important characters of the novel are touched and changed by the events that occur. Each person gains some self-knowledge as well as understanding of others. (p. 63)

Humor in The Grass Harp has a wide range: there is situational comedy as well as comic characters, verbal humor and physical humor. Some of it consists of slapstick stage business …, some depends on regional elements …, some suggests the influence of burlesque in sexual humor …, and some of the comedy depends on the reader's enjoyment of the tall tale. Although Capote frequently enlivens his work with humor, The Grass Harp contains more comic components than any of the author's other works. (p. 72)

The final passage [of The Grass Harp] returns to the beginning pages, a technique Capote later uses in Breakfast at Tiffany's. He establishes the pastness of the story about to be told. A tone of nostalgia underlies both the introduction and the conclusion, as it suggests the beauty but also the sweet melancholy of autumn with its brilliant colors and the wind blowing through the crackling leaves. Both here and in Breakfast at Tiffany's, the circular technique helps to create the sensation of remembrance: something lovely happened long ago and for a short time we participate in the recollection of the narrator. (p. 77)

Much of Breakfast at Tiffany's is muted in tone. Although there is a great deal of humor in a number of episodes, in the dialogue, and in some of the Damon Runyonesque characters, the liveliness exists inside a frame of memory. That remembrance has, like many of Capote's stories, an autumnal sound. (p. 87)

Breakfast at Tiffany's goes full circle. The beginning, which is actually the ending, has a gentle feeling of nostalgia. One hears in the background the echo of "gone" and "was," from Other Voices, Other Rooms, as the narrator walks towards the old brownstone apartment house, which stands "next to a church where a blue tower-clock tells the hours." This use of the past, memory, and sweet sadness is an identifying element of Capote's style. It is what some critics object to, labeling it style without substance. But this seems unfair caviling. For it is just that characteristic which sets off the story, encloses it, as if it were a narrative scene inside a crystal paperweight. At the same time that it pleases and delights, it suggests something else, a pleasurable melancholy for the days that are no more. (pp. 88-9)

Capote is like a painter in [the nonfiction sketches collected in Local Color]. He brushes in color upon color, shading, adding tonal quality. These are more than travel pieces or journalistic reports or anecdotes. They are all of these; in reading them along with the other essays and portraits of this period one may see the techniques that were vital to the writing of In Cold Blood. (p. 140)

Not only are the theme and characters [of In Cold Blood] intriguing, but so also are the methods Capote used to establish the reality of the drama he unfolds. Mingling realism with novelistic imagination, Capote gives the facts, disclosing them not in straightforward newspaper fashion but as a creative artist selecting details, positioning them, and reiterating them much as a painter repeats a line or color for meaning or intensity. The structural pattern also suggests film technique with its use of flashback and close-ups, its carefully depicted settings, the gathering momentum behind the escape, pursuit, and capture of the criminals, the crowd scenes, and the courtroom episodes. The tension of the narrative increases as the hunters—the murderers—become the hunted, and as they, the victimizers of a small innocent family, become (according to Capote's presentation) the victims of the large bureaucratic system of criminal justice in Kansas.

The story of the murder of an exemplary American family, an act of apparently "motiveless malignity," carries a universal appeal for readers, no matter how they view its ultimate meaning: as symbol of violence in America; as the failure of the American Dream; or as a social study of death-obsessed criminals. (pp. 143-44)

Structurally the work is designed to provide maximum suspense, a masterful accomplishment, inasmuch as newspaper reports had given the reader knowledge of the outcome. Capote moves back and forth, first between the criminals and the victims and then between the detectives and the criminals, creating the effect of a montage…. (p. 144)

[In] some ways the conclusion [of In Cold Blood] is like that of a Victorian novel, with all the characters accounted for, "deaths, births, marriages." More significantly, it is finished in quintessential Capote style, reminding the reader of The Grass Harp, Breakfast at Tiffany's, and "A Christmas Memory."

One May afternoon in Kansas "when the fields blaze with the green-gold fire of half-grown wheat," Dewey [the chief investigator] goes to the cemetery to visit his father's grave. Nearby are the graves of the Clutters, where he encounters Nancy Clutter's friend Susan Kidwell, now a young woman, a junior in college. They talk for a while, and as Susan leaves, Dewey envisions the way Nancy might have been, had she lived. The conclusion has Capote's memorable elegiac note. Dewey starts for home, going past the large trees, "leaving behind him the big sky, the whisper of wind voices in the wind-bent wheat."

Although some reviewers have criticized the ending as unfitting for a journalistic work, one must remember that this story is not purely documentary. Therefore, the ending seems completely appropriate to the artistic intent behind the novelistic element. Readers, left with a weight of sadness and loss, recognize that they have been confronted not only with an American tragedy but also the human tragedy, the wanton as well as the inexplicable nature of existence. (p. 164)

Helen S. Garson, in her Truman Capote (copyright © 1980 by Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., Inc.), Ungar, 1980, 210 p.