[In the following review of Other Voices, Other Rooms, Young asserts that Capote exhibits “the aura of individuality, of personality, a special atmosphere of thought and style, an attitude toward reality apart from any merely practical problem, character, or situation.”]

The large number of novels, even when well written, bear no qualifications of individuality. Except as to subject matter, one can scarcely be singled out from another. Other Voices, Other Rooms, the first novel by the young Southerner Truman Capote, does bear, in the writing itself, the aura of individuality, of personality, a special atmosphere of thought and style, an attitude toward reality apart from any merely practical problem, character, or situation. This work, like the short stories, is concerned with the extra-marginal, the symbols interloping among otherwise unintelligible experiences, the dreams, memories, perceptions, the fleeting peculiarities of human nature as revelatory of the psychic underworld which all persons inhabit in daylight. Character, problem, situation are secondary to these.

As in his short stories, the author veers away from the common sense world of familiar, tried orientations, utilizing instead data of the psychic underworld, signs, symbols, derangements which, through extension, seem metaphysical, a commentary upon man in space. There is nothing literal, though there is accuracy of observation, a deceptive accuracy. The individual is never the supposed normal but is a confluence of signs. The individual is cloaked in an arabesque of disguises psychologically motivated but not always stated, moving in a world of curved mirrors and distortions from which he cannot be distinguished, as the image reflected or the image of exaggerated deceit may be the only character. The text of moral analysis is thus absent from this amoral work of strange reversals and strange proportions, where the figure of a butterfly may well blot out a man or seem equated with him. But the very absence of such analysis may have its meaning in a mosaic of revelations, contributing, for example, to the hidden thesis that the abnormal does exist and is therefore valid.

Who is the individual person of whom Capote writes methodically, yet adventuresomely? It would be only the naive, most often the purposefully naive, who could dismiss this individual as altogether alien and strange. The individual, according to Capote's view, is not an organized whole so much as he is the aberrant fragment of self, something struck off from the whole, a piece of the unconscious, a single fleeting image in a disturbing mirror and representative of the repressed forces within the human mind which do put on their masquerades in order to mingle with and be indistinct from the legitimate actors on the shadowy stage of life. Bodies are not bodies here so much as they are revelations of some sectors of the mind—as-if people, suddenly betraying impotency, living death, memory, an implausible but actual world hinging on to this—other voices, other rooms. In much writing, we see the legitimate actors and deduce the illegitimate—whereas here, without confusion, the reverse process is taking place. Exotic creatures or creations—they could be winged, but they are not, they are neither cherubim nor birds—step out of the void, are glimpsed, are gone, are melted into the ether which gave them birth. People already dead, some who are heard but not seen, others who are seen but not heard, the young who are old, the old who are young, all seem equated with a spider's tracery in the wind. Some are flesh and blood but still are snow and shadow. Some are personifications of a child's intuitions, forebodings, dreams. Some pertain more to a haunted place than to any one person. Weight is thrown upon the side of the illusory being, perhaps to suggest that there is no other. When cognizance of the real flesh is taken, it is a bitter acknowledgement.

Capote's world is a miniature world but Gothic and spacious in the futurity of its design. It can grow. It is occupied, for the most part, by little people of a delicacy which is monstrous, by children, dream children, midget fading into starlight, doll-like witch jerking as if on strings, old people who are children. Monstrous sensitivity triumphs over monstrous strength to the extent that the small are strong and that the invisible are sometimes visible. In this romantic landscape of the South, the combination of intensely regional and sur-regional occurs as a matter of course, for nature cannot help exceeding itself if closely examined. The ruby-fingered hand of a drowned gambler rising from a still pond proclaims a land of high subjectivity, no boundary between past and present, between possible and impossible, between material and immaterial, between flesh and light. All that goes on is a project of the mental. The most brutal act, rape, is dictated by weakness. Characters continually divide into two parts, either in dream or in reality. The man who was believed to be a man is an ancient belle appearing for a moment in a reality which suddenly takes on the character of a dream. Actually, the situation of Randolph, disguised in a woman's clothing, because it was thus that he wooed his first love, is not far different from that of Mrs. Miller in the short story, “Miriam”—both are schizophrenic personalities, though both are symbolic in their texts and compel a sympathy not related to clinical cases. In “Miriam,” a middle-aged woman has become both herself and a senile, white-haired child—in Other Voices, Other Rooms, a similar demon harasses another by embodying his own consciousness in space. Both emerge from the hidden psychological life as visual objects, real or imaginary.

Other Voices, Other Rooms is thus a continuation of the stories and their concerns. As in The Tree of Night, the accumulated superstitions of childhood are brought into focus and illuminated. Everywhere is a feeling of the idiocy of experience apart from the inner life. Actuality fades as the dream construct grows. Love is equated with death. There are wind movements, ballets in clouds, eyes at every keyhole, voices in empty rooms, little people who are too old, old people who are too young and whose innocence is evil. Everyone is doing, too, a disappearing act. The atmosphere is subtly explosive. Everything takes place at the intersection between two traffic lines, the real and unreal, which then reverse positions as by magic or blend in one streaming track. At any moment, there comes a crucial eruption, incident, or image showing these lines conjoined, inseparable, ever apparent, and that a terrifying potency may inhabit impotent things, and that persons must be considered in terms of images and perceptions other than themselves.

It is not accidental that we have come to “lonesome country; and here in the swamp-like hollows where tiger lilies bloom the size of a man's head, there are luminous green logs that shine under the dark marsh water like drowned corpses. …” For this landscape is also psychic, a mystery.