Murder in Kansas
Malin, Irving
Murder in Kansas In Cold Blood, by Truman Capote. Random House. 343 pp. $5.95. Reviewed by Irving Malin Capote's In Cold Blood begins with ^ a lengthy description of a Kansas town. Holcomb...
...Perry joyfully finds a rest home in jail...
...fantasy corrupted the "usual...
...We realize that the murder is not "motiveless" or "senseless"—it is the startling, accurate reflection of the demons which lie hidden around (and within) us...
...Holcomb (population 270) is a "normal," empty, and flavorless place: "drama, in the shape of exceptional happenings, had never stopped there...
...Clutter walking through an orchard, almost "an Eden on earth," and Perry smoking cigarettes, swallowing three aspirins, and sipping root beer for breakfast...
...We are shown the four members of the family, the parents and two children, as they live before the event...
...In Cold Blood is the story of the "senseless" murder of the Clutters...
...This event transformed Holcomb...
...we cannot be sure in which world we really live...
...In Cold Blood is fiction based on reality—isn't any novel?—but because it is so well done, it is, finally, more real than the event it portrays...
...he would rather admit murder than his prefernce for little girls...
...He meticulously documents the causes and consequences of a real event (a news item he first encountered in The New York Times...
...Dick wants to be considered "normal...
...The reporter assumes that the truth can be known and even stated in headlines...
...Minor details support the basic "irony" that an extraordinary murder should occur in average Holcomb...
...It is shocking for us to see, successively, Mr...
...Because this kind of violent juxtaposition structures the entire book we are continually unsettled...
...Then Capote shifts to two outsiders, Perry Smith and Dick Hickock, making their preparation for the fatal visit to the Clutters...
...Capote has claimed that In Cold Blood is "a non-fiction novel" which transcends traditional genres...
...But he cannot help shaping these into an imaginative pattern...
...Of course, we are horrified by these ironies but, paradoxically enough, we smile inwardly because we have learned one deep truth—life is so contrary...
...In a way he is right...
...The very fact that he employs the violent juxtapositions of tone and atmosphere I have mentioned signifies that he is creating new reality...
...he dies by hanging as his childish feet dangle...
...without flinching, especially when Capote reminds us that Susan is "such a young woman as Nancy [Clutter] might have been...
...But then we read that one day in mid-November of 1959 something happened...
...This is Capote's final, unconscious irony—the liberating irony of art...
...Two worlds collide...
...This is Capote's strategy: he puts us on edge because he wants us to accept, if not embrace, the terrifying unbalance of life...
...He selects to persuade us...
...The opening pages brilliantly introduce the conflict between reality and nightmare, normalcy and strangeness...
...In Cold Blood is thoroughly ironic...
...The last few pages describe a visit of Mr...
...The artist, however, realizes that he can never give a "true account...
...No longer can we read "Good luck" or "Do you have the time...
...Dewey, the detective, and Susan Kidwell, a local girl, to the cemetery in which the Clutters are buried...
...After the murder, Perry and Dick find forty dollars rather than the thousands they expect...
...if he is lucky, he can order reality tentatively...
...They meet accidentally and exchange pleasantries before they walk their separate ways...
...He always dreams of an angel who gently lifts him to heaven...
Vol. 30 • March 1966 • No. 3
