The American Century: Literature since 1945 701interviewer and a careful recorder. Second, what is needed is a scrupulously detailed
and exact recording of the everyday gestures, habits, and manners of people, their
styles of clothing, furniture, and so on. Third, there needs to be a careful arrangement
of the narrative, scene by scene. Fourth, the New Journalist should deploy a consistent
narrative point of view, so that the reader can see things just as the reporter saw
them and be drawn into them just as he or she was. Curiously, this formula does not
precisely inform Wolfe’s own nonfiction. He has published many collections of
essays commenting on contemporary American culture, from its popular heroes to
its alternative lifestyles. The collections include The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flame
Streamline Baby (1965), The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1968), Radical Chic and
Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers (1970), The Painted Word (1975) about the
pretensions of the art world, and The Right Stuff (1979) about US astronauts, “gods
for a day.” But, as the titles of many of these collections suggest, what most of his
essays are notable for is their wit, bravura, and high octane prose: a baroque pop
style that offers a sardonic reflection of, and comment on, their subjects. Wolfe is,
above all, a satirist or jet-set sociologist, intent on making sly fun of the shiny surfaces
and strutting heroes of his culture. His prescription for the New Journalism does not
really fit his own nonfiction; still less does it fit the immense Swiftian satire of his
novels, The Bonfire of the Vanities (1987), A Man in Full (1998), and I Am Charlotte
Simmons (2004). Rather, it fits perfectly some of the work of Norman Mailer
(The Armies of the Night, The Executioner’s Song) and Joan Didion (Slouching
Towards Bethlehem, The White Album), and the later writing of Truman Capote,
above all In Cold Blood (1966).
Capote had already acquired a reputation before he published In Cold Blood with
books such as Other Voices, Other Rooms (1948), a Gothic tale about a homosexually
inclined boy groping toward maturity, The Grass Harp (1951), and Breakfast at
Tiffany’s (1958), about a light-hearted, freewheeling, romantic playgirl living in New
Yo r k C i t y. In Cold Blood was something different, however. It was based on fact. In
1959 two ex-convicts, Perry Smith and Richard Hickock, broke into the isolated
farmhouse of a respectable family called the Clutters, tied up the four family
members who were there, then killed them. All they got for loot was between forty
and fifty dollars. Having learned about the brutal incident, Capote worked on and
off for five years, interviewing friends and family, surviving members, and detectives
investigating the murders. Then, once Smith and Hickock were caught, Capote got
to know them as well, talking to them during the trial, after their conviction, and
right up until the time of their execution in 1965. Out of the mass of material he
accumulated, Capote then produced what he called his “Nonfiction Novel.” His aim
in writing it, he explained, was simple. He wanted to make the cold fact of the
murder understandable. By implication, he wanted to make the violence characteristic
of contemporary society understandable. And the best way he could do this, he felt,
was by presenting that cold fact in the context of other facts: above all, by avoiding
anything not derived from observation, interview, and record. Capote tries to avoid
commentary in the book; he also seeks to eschew analysis, social or psychological,
simply presenting what he has seen or heard. He does, however, permit himself useGGray_c05.indd 701ray_c 05 .indd 701 8 8/1/2011 7:31:40 PM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 31 : 40 PM