Volume 16, Number 6 · April 8, 1971
The World as a Novel: From Capote to Mailer
By Alfred Kazin
When Truman Capote explained, on the publication of In Cold Blood, that the book was really a 'nonfiction novel,' it was natural to take his description of his meticulously factual and extraordinarily industrious record of research as the alibi of a novelist whose last novel, Breakfast at Tiffany's, had been slight, and who was just now evidently between novels. Capote clearly hungered to remain in the league of novelists, so many of whom are unprofitable to everyone, even if he was now the author of a best-selling true thriller whose success was being arranged through every possible exploitation of American publicity. And all these things were true. Capote is a novelist, novelists tend often enough to be stuck in novels, discouraged by the many discourtesies to current fiction. Clearly Capote wanted to keep his professional standing but to rise above the novelist's usual battle for survival. In Cold Blood, before one read it, seemed by the very nature of the American literary market to be another wow, a trick, a slick transposition from one realm to another, like the inevitable musical to be made out of the Sacco-Vanzetti case.
Feature, 6428 words
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