"Breakfast at Tiffany's" is a valentine of love, fashioned by way of reminiscence, to one Holly Golightly…. This is a very funny portrait of an ex-child wife from some place named Tulip, Tex.—who made several mistakes upon coming to New York….

She is a wild thing searching for something to belong to. (p. 5)

When her pineywoods husband comes to New York and explains the psychological and spiritual basis for her behavior, Holly seems to the reader less feasible.

When Mr. Capote begins to make up a plot involving Holly and one Sally Tomato (a dope peddler serving a term in Sing Sing) he vitiates the up-to-then sharp power of his character. He also plunges his reader into an unbelievable melodrama involving crime, defrocked priests, lost brothers, etc., and asks us to believe psychological motivations compelling Holly that we are not prone to put our faith in very seriously.

Mr. Capote's characteristic resorting to almost vaudevillian devices weakens his originally serious conception of his character, thins it down and so, in mid-reading, forces the reader to a dimmer view of her. This kind of genial philandering runs through all these stories, a tendency to over-glaze situations, to overdress characters—not stylistically so much as conceptionally—a tendency to fool with characters on the author's terms of whimsy, not on the characters. (pp. 5, 38)

"A Diamond Guitar" and "House of Flowers" are two dainty pieces, blown like pretty pieces of dyed boa into the air. They are both cute stories with enough heart in them to cause a stroke. This cuteness in Mr. Capote often supplants truth, just as the names of his characters often supplant depth of characterization. Names like Mag Wildwood, Mr. Haha Jones, Jose Ybarra-Jaeger, Tieo Feo seem to have come first to the author's mind and then been fitted to a character….

"A Christmas Memory" is a truly Valentine-like reminiscence of the sweet and far-away relationship between a Capotesque little old lady aged "sixty-something" and a boy named Buddy…. The bucolic mood, the descriptions of Southern woods and pastures, seem half-bred (there is a little of the brownstone in them). It is a curiously heartless and unfelt story despite its sentimental intention, and is laced with maidenly metaphor.

In all these stories there is the noble Capote talent for catching the off-beat nature of people and for writing about them as though he were delivering a midnight monologue before his audience-reader. There is in this work the quality of doll-like glee; of creating and dwelling in a dolly story-world entirely of the author's own tatting, of staying in it with his characters, come high water or low, until he has to get out of it—if he does. Then he might take the way out of chic, or of marshmallow romance, of spoof or cracker barrel. Capote makes unique reading. (p. 38)