When this kicked off I thought it was way too glossy, All-American and colour-supplement feature essay-esque. It seemed like every page was overfilled with Americana. I thought it would be too saccharine to tolerate for long and stylistically too insubstantial to carry hundreds of pages. Everything feels like a slightly overworked scene from a cliched movie. In the end, even though neither the prose or the dialogue grew on me much, I enjoyed the book and read it quickly after starting.
Two things stood out to me as important. First, the pace and construction of the narrative. Secondly, the depth and breadth of the research carried out to place the crime in its context. Capote is an expert sketcher of characters and scenes and piqued my interest in the idyllic family, the pair of crims and how the horrific murders were eventually traced back to them. It’s true that by the end, I had had about enough of these sketches when he began to profile the various members of death row in Kansas in exactly the same manner. At that stage it felt like watching too many episodes of a TV show about murderers. However, rather than the quality of the individual pieces of prose, none of which were especially memorable to me, it was how they were assembled and the diversity of their perspectives that made the book good. Capote clearly did his research, or made up a lot of stuff, but the end effect is the same, he builds interest in the characters and how things happened the way they did. Inevitably, the brutal murderers are somewhat humanised by their hardscrabble backgrounds. Capote also seems to surmise that jail was more of a hindrance than a help to both men. Nonetheless, they seem so ordinary, and the crime is so pointless, it’s almost impossible to believe things like this can happen regardless of the mitigating circumstances. But in a world of billions of people, or about 2.5bn in 1950, all sorts of highly improbable things ended up happening. I was left thinking that problems of inequality, both financial and emotional, can end in violent outcomes in a society that values money above everything else. But when much of a person’s actions depend on their individual childhood experiences and relationships, as Capote strongly suggests, the problem seems gargantuan and almost impossible to influence in all but the most meagre ways.
A question that played on my mind after reading the book was why people, myself included, enjoy this genre? Do I want to learn about the killers so I can dismiss them as a deranged aberration? Do I want to rationalise them and their actions so the crimes seem less inexplicable? There’s a contradictory pull of familiarity and differentiation - ‘they’re just like me’ and ‘they’re nothing like me / how could they do that?’. At some level, murders are interesting to humans because they’re reasonably rare and deal in stakes of life or death. As with all disasters, there is a fascination with how things can go so badly wrong. Perhaps, we imagine we have known a rage that could be murderous or can imagine some provocation that might drive us there. Even if that is the case, which is debatable, I feel very few people consider shooting people ‘in cold blood’. Smith, who does the actual killing, knows it is wrong but seems incapable of feeling anything about it. Seen from this angle, being a murderer seems like a rare medical condition. An absence of empathy so gaping that you can’t feel anything about cutting a man’s throat or shooting a defenceless teenager in the face. Capote explores how responsible the perpetrators should be held for their crimes and the morality of capital punishment in a precursory way. It’s not the highlight of the book but it is an interesting subject worth introducing and considering beside the specific case of the murders. The book does this often and well. It asks a lot of questions without adopting a strong moral stance of its own. In this sense, the book is bleak. The book’s highlight for me was the pacing of the narrative and the mastery of the subject Capote has acquired. Regardless of whether the story is true to life or embellished, Capote knows every aspect of it and in that way has created a little world in which he is an excellent master and guide. It doesn’t matter much to me if some of the characters turn out to be actors.
I would definitely recommend this book even though the prose wasn’t that great. The narrative is adroitly spun and I did care about some of the characters, especially the crims, even though Capote hams them all up quite heavily. It pushes a lot of the right buttons in terms of intrigue. In a way that makes you feel a bit guilty about it afterwards.
No comments:
Post a Comment