Published in Esquire in the mid-1970's but never before in book form, here are the three extant chapters from Capote's notorious, never-finished "non-fiction novel" about his society/literary friends—part roman á clef, part naked gossip using real names. (A fourth chapter, "Mojave," was cut from the novel and published separately in Music for Chameleons, his final collection.) All three pieces are narrated circa 1971 by 35-ish P.B. Jones—a composite portrait (including some Capote) of the ultimate bisexual writer/hustler/gigolo, impish and languid and bitchy. In "Unspoiled Monsters," P.B. recounts his climb from St. Louis orphanage to teen-age "Hershey Bar whore" ("there wasn't much I wouldn't do for a nickel's worth of chocolate") to New York—where he gets published via sex with Turner Boatwright, fiction editor of a women's fashion magazine; from there he moves on to opportunistic liaisons with legendary Southern writer Alice Lee Langman ("a relentless bedroom back-seat driver"), drug-addict Denny Fouts in Paris ("Best-Kept Boy in the World" of Isherwood fame), et al.—but ends up penniless back in NY, reduced to working as a professional whore for Miss Victoria Self's "Self Service." (Among his clients: a thinly disguised Tennessee Williams—in the grotesque, pathetic version that's now familiar, thanks to Dotson Rader and others.) Then, in "Kate McCloud," P.B. recalls his first meeting with reclusive beauty Kate—"goddess of the fashion press," ex-wife of a mad young society scion, current estranged wife of an old billionaire German industrialist; P.B. is hired to be Kate's masseur/bodyguard (the German hubby may be out to kill her), there's great erotic tension. . .but the story remains incomplete. Finally, in the infamous "La Cote Basque," P.B. recalls a lunch date at that restaurant: a nonstop gossip-a-thon, including overheard conversation from the nearby table occupied by Gloria Vanderbilt and Mrs. Walter Matthau (an unflattering duo-portrait). Along, the way, P.B. delivers (or hears) nasty tidbits about bygone celebs—Barbara Hutton, Dorothy Parker, Montgomery Clift, Tallulah, Cole Porter, Peggy Guggenheim, Natalie Barney—as well as some still living; (Ned Rorem is "an intolerable combination of brimstone behavior and sell-righteous piety.") So, though dated, this is an undeniable source of slimy scuttlebutt—especially for those able, or interested enough, to decode the clefs. And, along with the malicious eloquence and an unprecedented ribaldry (sometimes exuberant, sometimes just gross), there are glimmers of Capote's storytelling talent. But the overall effect, somewhat wearying even at novella length, is shiny and shallow—with nothing to suggest that a completed Answered Prayers would have been anything like a masterpiece.
Pub Date: Sept. 21, 1987
ISBN: 0679751823
Page Count: 216
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Oct. 10, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1987
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Flannery O’Connor fans will be drawn to this fictionalized version of her later years as a strong-willed, deeply lonely genius.
In the early 1960s, when wealthy New Yorker Melvin Whiteson moves to Milledgeville to marry his sweetheart Cookie Himmel, Flannery is living with her mother on the family farm, struggling to complete her second novel and suffering increasingly from the lupus that eventually kills her. A lifelong poultry aficionado, Flannery is also raising peacocks. In the novel’s striking first scene, Cookie and Melvin are awakened on the eve of their wedding by the peacocks’ din, a foreshadowing of what’s to happen to the couple. They love each other but do not understand each other. Emotionally fragile Cookie has considered Flannery her nemesis ever since she read Wise Blood and felt exposed in the worst light as the character Sabbath Lily. A cutting remark Flannery made at Cookie’s high-school awards ceremony so humiliated the girl that she left town as soon as she graduated. Sporting her new rich and handsome husband, Cookie has returned desperate to prove to Milledgeville what a glamorous success she has become and throws herself into community activities. Sophisticated but aimless Melvin finds himself at loose ends in the small town. Soon he finds himself drawn to Flannery in a platonic but intense relationship he hides from Cookie. When Cookie has a baby, she and Melvin begin to re-establish their connection, but ultimately Melvin cannot stay away from Flannery. Meanwhile, Cookie has hired the deputy sheriff’s wife Lona Waters, another lonely outsider, to make curtains for their new impressive home. Inevitably these unhappy lives—Lona has begun a dangerous relationship of her own—wind together until violent, senseless deaths occur, propelling characters into dark nights of the soul but also the possibility of Flannery O’Connor–like grace. The tone and careful use of language certainly recalls O’Connor, but Napolitano (Within Arm’s Reach, 2004) takes too many shortcuts around her plot and characters to bring the novel to life.
Pub Date: July 11, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-59420-292-6
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Penguin Press
Review Posted Online: June 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2011
A luminous novel about the deep value of telling stories.
Two strangers are unknowingly connected by a rare manuscript.
Maxwell Moreau, born to a pirate father and a Dominican immigrant mother in New Orleans in 1920, has a childhood in which he is surrounded by his parents’ stories. His mother, Adana Moreau, learns to read in English with Maxwell at her side. She writes a well-received science fiction novel, Lost City, but becomes gravely ill before finishing the sequel, A Model Earth; she and Maxwell burn the manuscript before she dies . The pirate travels north in search of work, and Maxwell is effectively an orphan when his father fails to meet him as planned in Chicago. Nearly 80 years later, a man named Saul is grieving the death of his grandfather, his only family after his parents were killed in a terrorist attack in Israel. Shortly before dying, his grandfather had asked Saul to mail a package for him to someone named Maxwell Moreau at a university in Chile. When the package is returned some time later, Saul takes on the task of finding Maxwell, now a well-known physicist who theorizes about parallel universes, to give him the papers inside—the same manuscript Adana Moreau had burned so many years earlier—and fulfill his grandfather’s last request. This search takes Saul and his friend Javier to New Orleans just after Hurricane Katrina, and the two reflect on their friendship and Saul’s grandfather’s work as a historian as Javier documents the extensive loss of life in an effort to bear witness. Zapata’s debut novel is a wonderful merging of adventure with thoughtful but urgent meditations on time, history, and surviving tragedy. The characters are richly drawn, and the prose is striking: “They drove east, back the way they had come, and the road seemed to take on an extra-temporal quality, like they were traveling backward in time. We’re already meeting ourselves coming the other way, he thought as the Cadillac sped on and on and on.”
A luminous novel about the deep value of telling stories.Pub Date: Feb. 4, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-335-01012-4
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Hanover Square Press
Review Posted Online: Nov. 10, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2019
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