When [Capote] thinks, he is like nobody else—lapidary craftsman, master of nuance and detail. When he babbles, he is a nobody. Music for Chameleons displays the thinking Truman—with the customary intrusion of commonness that has marred much of his work.

Everything is displayed in this crow's nest of a book…. The title story is all the author claims for it…. The prose blackens, alters its tone, summons ghosts, and recalls Caribbean melodies and celebrations. (p. 30)

The High Capote returns in such pieces as "Dazzle," a Proustian recollection of the day he first wished aloud to be a girl, and when he sensed that for the rest of his life he would be haunted by the derision greeting his request. And I found a superabundance of moving tragicomedy in "A Day's Work."… Yet even here, Capote cannot resist low vaudeville Jew jokes—the Berkowitz parrot, named Polly, naturally, has learned to say "Oy Vey!" Mary Sanchez describes the bird's owners as "real stuffy Jewish people. And you know how stuffy they are!" Capote: "Jewish people? Gosh, yes. Very stuffy. They ought to be in the Museum of Natural History. All of them."

Of course, it may be that the reader is supposed to be as stoned reading this as Capote was when he said it. Otherwise one might almost mistake it for country-club bigotry masquerading as social satire.

Still, as he would be the first to proclaim, Capote's powers derive from his weaknesses: fussiness becomes exactitude; gossip, acute dialogue; snobbism, a form of confession; and the announcement of new art forms, a refurbishing of the old ones. There is, in fact, nothing new in Capote's new book, except Capote. (p. 31)

The self-inflation introducing Music for Chameleons will soon fade. Dust-jacket prose always does. The stories and vignettes will endure, not because they enlighten and certainly not because they bear any moral qualities. They will last because, however variable their quality, they entertain…. [It] is not Oscar Wilde whom Capote now evokes, but the Comparable Max [Beerbohm], caricaturing the famous, writing with a deceptively casual, limpid prose style….

There is still another figure Capote strains to emulate. There it is hovering around the portrait for Music for Chameleons: the eyes, no longer hidden by spectacles, stare out pitilessly like Isak Dinesen's. The hands are like claws. The mouth no longer smiles. At the figure's back are 14 hypnotic tales. He hints, and we believe him, that there is more, far more to tell. Truman Capote's pose and Bert Stern's photograph make it all too clear who decorates this book: Sheherazade in drag. (p. 32)