Book Review: Answered Prayers

(Borrowed from friends' house in Mexico): During our ten-day vacation visiting friends at their home in Malinalco, Mexico, I finished both the Anne Tyler novels I brought along and needed a break from the incredible complexities of Jennifer Egan's The Candy House (which I'm almost finished with.) I came across Truman Capote's notorious, incomplete roman a scandale on their bookshelf. Despite having read it a few years ago, I started it as a stopgap between books and couldn't put it down, completing it in a few hours. 

This does not mean it's a good book, but it is a juicy read. Capote contracted with Random House on a Proustian take-down of international cafe society (as they called in The Barefoot Contessa). He completed only three chapters and published each in Esquire Magazine, alienating all of his high-tone friends, his "swans," spilling their collective beans without even bothering to change their names in some cases. He claimed to have written several additional chapters, but never turned them in to his publisher, finally dying in Joanne Carson's bedroom. The remainder of the manuscript has never surfaced. In the TV-mini-series Capote Vs. The Swans, the fictional version of Capote burns the missing chapters. But I believe he never completed his assignment, having run dry of creative juices while drowning in drugs and alcohol, destroyed by the backlash from his former admirers. If he had written anymore than we have received, those texts would have been found by now. (I did find an alleged missing fragment called "Yachts and Things" on the Internet, but I cannot vouch for its authenticity and it's thin and negligible. A fourth chapter, "Mojave" was also published in Esquire, but was later published as a separate short story in Capote's collection Music for Chameleons.)

In editor James M. Fox's introduction, he reveals Capote claimed to have written the last untitled chapter, the first two (Unspoiled Monsters and Kate McCloud), the fifth (A Severe Insult to the Brain), and the seventh (the infamous La Cote Basque). The last and fifth chapters remain missing. All we have are the three pieces that appeared in Esquire. As they stand, they are entertaining, but ultimately unsatisfying. The first two chapters at least have a narrative drive and seem to go somewhere. Down-on-his luck drifter, masseur and would-be writer PB Jones (obviously a stand-in for the author) unwinds his sad tale of floating around Europe and alternating his past exploits with his present sorry state of working as a male prostitute, counting a thinly-veiled, pathetic Tennessee Williams among his clients. Careering from Paris to Tangiers to Venice, Jones encounters the Holly Golighty-like Kate McCloud, a stunning siren living in isolated luxury after two disastrous marriages. Capote's self-portrait is a bisexual stud, pleasing to both men and women with a memory for gossipy anecdotes involving the likes of Ned Rorem, Tallullah Bankhead, Dorothy Parker, Montgomery Clift, and many other famous names. 

The second chapter ends with Jones meeting Kate and imagining a future where he helps Kate kidnap her child from her second husband, a German millionaire. We then jump to the supposed seventh chapter, "La Cote Basque," wherein Jones has stepped up from the oldest profession and is now the intimate of tout le haute monde. Kate has evidently vanished from his life. While lunching with Lady Ina Coolbreath (in reality Slim Keith), he overhears and repeats salacious tidbits from and about Gloria Vanderbilt, Carol Matthau, Jacqueline Onassis and her sister Princess Lee Radziwell (names are not bothered to be changed) and, Babe Paley. This is the chapter that utterly destroyed Capote's reputation and arguably his life. Practically all of his friends deserted him--and for what? Some nasty bedroom tales?

I'm sure he thought this work would be on a par with Proust and Fitzgerald, exposing the frailties of the ultra-rich and making a "major statement" about our corrupt society. But it's just an incomplete harangue, beautifully written in places.

I can imagine what the rest of the novel would have been like: PB Jones and Kate McCloud rescue her son from the clutches of her former spouse in a daring raid worthy of James Bond. They run across the world with the husband's murderous minions in hot pursuit. After several chapters encountering thinly-veiled celebrities, the hunters catch up with them. Maybe Kate is killed, maybe the kid too? Jones gets away with his life and returns to NYC where we find him at the beginning of the book. In the present he goes to the farm of one of clients for Thanksgiving. He finds happiness of a kind as the secret lover of the client whose wife is very understanding, but not before having lunch with Lady Ina Coolbreath.