Out in print

Capote in Kansas: A Ghost Story
Kim Powers
Carroll & Graf

As you may have learned at the movies, two of the great American books of the 20th century were written by a pair of Southern outcasts who'd been friends since childhood. Nelle Harper Lee won a Pulitzer Prize for her semi-autobiographical To Kill a Mockingbird, and helped her friend Truman Capote gather material for his masterpiece, the "true fiction" crime account In Cold Blood. These books proved to be the high points of their careers; Lee worked for years on a second novel but never published anything else of significance, and Capote's work declined in both quality and quantity. Lee became something of a recluse, and Capote's physical and mental health deteriorated with the help of alcohol and drugs. This book is a sort of fantasia on the last years of the authors' lives that explores what might have caused the decline in their careers and the distance in their friendship. Beginning with a bizarre late-night phone call from Capote, who is seeing the ghosts of the murdered family he made famous with In Cold Blood, Powers suggests that Capote never really left that Kansas crime scene; that he is haunted with guilt over using real life tragedy to sell books, and with guilt over forcing a break with Lee to get away from the secrets they shared. We further learn that Lee still wrestles with her own ambivalence about fictionalizing her childhood, and the jealousy and need that once bound her and Capote together. It all sounds like it ought to be interesting, doesn't it? But the wispy, strangely bloodless book fails to satisfy. Powers's curlicued, emphatic prose, full of italics and all caps and endless digressions and loop de loops, reads like an overextended writing exercise on finding a character's inner voice. If you accept that Lee and Capote were literary vampires, perhaps there's some kind of poetic justice in their lives being appropriated for this meandering mush, reduced to strange but vaguely cute caricatures. But if they were grave robbers, they at least wrote good books with their plunder. Capote in Kansas is just fan fiction.

The Right Side of the Wrong Bed

Since I raised the topic of fan fiction above, let me ask you, reader: Do you know what a Mary Sue is? If this concept from the world of fan fiction hasn't crossed over into the general literary world, it ought to. A Mary Sue is a character that is a tool for the writer's own wish fulfillment. He or she is just too good to be true, and good things always happen to him or her. Now allow me to introduce you to The Right Side's protagonist. Kenny Kane "seems to have it all," as the book blurb proclaims. He's handsome, he has a good job, a house, a posh car, a loving circle of friends and the support of his cutely gruff mother. And he just got out of a bad relationship with a manipulative jerk. In other words, Kenny's only problem is that he just has too much love to give! The upside of that problem is that it leads him into an improbable relationship with another manipulative jerk, this time 10 years his junior. Poor Kenny! He's forced to alternately nurture, and have marathon sex with, a young stud who seems like a shallow player but actually has hidden depths of emotion and intelligence. And a big dick. Smith's writing style is as staccato as Powers's is diffuse. He never met a sentence fragment. He didn't. Like. The bad grammar is amusing considering Kenny's scorn for his boy-toy's slang, but the true hilarity comes when Smith uses words whose meaning he doesn't seem to know. (How do you wear a hat vicariously?) Those gems, a few hot sex scenes and a surprise ending are the highlights. But there's a lot of slogging through interminable and dull interior monologues in between. Like Powers, Smith is too inexplicably fascinated with every stray thought going through his character's head to ever get to the point.