702 The American Century: Literature since 1945of the four novelistic devices Wolfe prescribed for the New Journalism. In particular,
the entire narrative is carefully structured scene by scene, section by section. The
first section, for instance, leads slowly up to the killing, building tension by cutting
between the Clutter family and Smith and Hickock driving toward them. The second
concentrates on the search for the killers, the third describes them after their arrest
and during their trial; and the fourth, final section brings them to death row and
eventual execution.
Using this narrative arrangement, Capote avoids sensationalism. For example, the
actual murders are only described in the third section, through the recollection and
confessions of the murderers; there is no attempt made to step outside of this, in
some kind of voyeuristic, melodramatic way. What he avoids, though, is less
important than what he gains. In Cold Blood takes violence out of the backwoods
and the city – their usual sites in American fiction – and into the heartland. In doing
so, it vividly juxtaposes the contrasts and contradictions of American life. The dream
and the nightmare, the everyday and the aberrant, American normalcy and its dark
underbelly: these opposites are powerfully registered, thanks to Capote’s method of
presentation. More than that, they come together in direct conflict in the central
event of the book. Capote cannot, of course, entirely absent himself in terms of
sympathy from the narrative. He was clearly drawn to one of the murderers, the
misfit Perry Smith, and it shows. He was also a stranger to the kind of middle
American tastes and habits the Clutters embodied, and that occasionally shows too.
But this is a book that works because, most of the time, it is coolly dispassionate.
Capote captures, with a cold but uncynical eye, the bleak emptiness of life on the
vast wheat plains of Kansas, that area of the Midwest where the Clutters lived and
worked. With equal dispassion, he catches the quiet desperation of Smith and
Hickock, as they wander across the country in search of a job or, more often, in
search of someone to rob and perhaps kill. There is no explanation supplied for the
killing. “The crime was a psychological accident, virtually an impersonal act; the
victims might as well have been killed by lightning,” we are told at one point. “Except
for one thing: they had experienced prolonged terror, they had suffered.” Things
happen, people suffer; those who make them suffer must suffer in turn. That is the
closest In Cold Blood, wedded to the cult of the fact, comes to a judgment. Otherwise,
it is left to the reader to see the violence as random, gratuitous, meaningless – and,
to that extent, peculiarly typical of America and, in particular, the contemporary
American scene.
The prose style of In Cold Blood is one of scrupulous meanness. Capote was to use
it again with conspicuously less success in later books like Music for Chameleons
(1980), a collection of pieces, and his unfinished novel, Answered Prayers (1986). It
is also a style that is favored by those writers known as dirty realists. They include
Bobbie Ann Mason and Jayne Ann Phillips, at least in their early work, Larry Brown
(1945–2004), and Harry Crews (1935–). What these writers honor and articulate are
the lives of the working poor: people who have to sell their labor, or even their
bodies, to live and who might, at any time, lose everything, including the basic
dignities that make human beings human. “This is America, where money’s moreGGray_c05.indd 702ray_c 05 .indd 702 8 8/1/2011 7:31:40 PM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 31 : 40 PM