He Liked to Imbibe the Old Booze; or, the True Crimes against Style; or, the Thesaurarial Tipping-Point

If you ever want to enjoy the true crime genre, don't let this be your introduction to it.  The artful construction and subtle characterizations will render the rest unreadable.  I say this as someone whose standards for insomnious reading material rival those of an illiterate fourth grader. 

As dawn threatens to break, I want books with broad strokes and—in a perfect world—pictures.  Gruesome, preferably, to assuage the animal instincts four sleepless nights can stoke.  With this criteria in mind, consider this well-reviewed, highly-recommended  "account of rape, torture and murder on the California coast."   

Broad strokes?  Check. 

Pictures?  Check. 

Gruesome pictures?  Check.

Sounds perfect, no? 

Not so much.  This book contains prose so poor and so clichéd I initially thought it artful.  How better to deflate the pretensions of a walking superiority complex with a penchant for folksy speech than to stuff sentences like "he liked to imbibe the old booze" in his head?  Isn't that why they invented third-person omniscience?  Alas, the effect is not intentional. 

If you count the number of appearances the word "drink" makes in the previous paragraph, you have raw data enough to begin a statistical analysis of what I'll call The Thesaurarial Tipping-Point.  By which I mean, the number of times a word can appear before a writer is driven to thesaurize his prose like a penurious fornicatress. 

While the pressures of undergraduate life can partly explain my previous lexigraphical lament, from a well-published author in an award-winning book, such brobdingnagian pettifogging is completely unacceptable.  Especially when the book in question is perused to extricate the reader from the pencil-in-hand, professorial pose of the professional English professor. 

Infelicitous prose alone is not enough to warrant condemnation.  All the "penetrating of the soil" aside, this book would not be the literary cesspool it is without the death of a couple of clichés.  What if the subject of a true crime novel imbibed a little of the old booze then raped, tortured and murdered Barbie?  Wouldn't that be incredible?  Well...

Rachel [X] and Aundria [Y] had led lives of beauty, hope, and trust.  They sought to better themselves in one of the most gorgeous locations in the entire United States.  They had dreams and wishes they were on the verge of fulfilling.  Instead, they ended up in shallow graves beneath piles of trash on one man's property.

Can you believe that?  These perfect girls led perfect lives.  They would've married perfect husbands, birthed perfect children and won perfect divorces.  Amazing how human they seem.  Who better to marshal my sympathies for than people who exist only in the moment their deaths are reported on the local news?  That I had more sympathy for the murderers in Capote's In Cold Blood than the victims whose last hours Corey Mitchell chronicles in Dead and Buried speaks to some sort of massive generic failure.  I would say more, but I've whinged enough for one night...

Comments

[Vance Maverick]

I believe your bad example is this. (Currently both your links point to Capote.)

[Coeur Féministe]

I was waiting for this...

You crack me up! I think I spent more time on dictionary.com than reading your comments on this terribly written book.
I'm sorry it was such a disappointment, perhaps you should continue with the televised narrative instead of these "Best Sellers". Did Oprah recommend this on her show? That might explain all the hype.

[Vance Maverick]

What a train-wreck. It reads like some of the parodies in Ulysses. Just to take one sentence:

They sought to better themselves in one of the most gorgeous locations in the entire United States.

That they were college students doesn't make their deaths more significant. That San Luis Obispo is set on a pretty coastline is irrelevant too. But to jam these two sentimentalities into one sentence as if they reinforced one another takes perverse genius.

[Luther Blissett]

Scott, are you really that impressed by Capote? I found *In Cold Blood* remarkably boring. Perhaps I expected something more from the "non-fiction novel." By novel, I thought critics meant a prose form that gives a meaningful narrative shape to human experience. *In Cold Blood* does little more than set the scene, narrate the events, and at times creepily eroticize one of the murderers. Capote proves he has little psychological or social insight into what drives man to crime, how a community reacts to crime, or even the ethics of how one should discuss crime. And it's not even scary (and I scare very easily -- couldn't sleep well for a month after viewing the horrenous *House of Wax* with Paris Hilton).

[Scott Eric Kaufman]

Coeur Féministe, unfortunately the recommendation wasn't Oprah's, but popular book reviews. I scoured the past decade of reviews in the LA Times, the NY Times, &c. looking for the best of the genre, and this is what popped up. Yes, complete crap, but you knew it would be. (For the rest of you, C.F. knew I'd be mocking this book since the faux-Thanksgiving we held last Friday.)

Vance, thanks for the correction. This is the third time TypePad's done this to me lately. I'm not sure why it doesn't recognize the second link, but it doesn't. I need to pay more attention, though. But you're right, everything about this book seeks to transform the incidental into something important, and it always fails. I can't unrecommend it highly enough.

L.B., you have to remember that I taught literary journalism for four years. Not that that's a direct defense of the book, but it speaks to my evidentiary inclinations. What's remarkable about the book isn't what's contained in it so much as how Capote acquired that information, how he spent the better part of eight years gathering it. Writing a book which is both moving and true is far more difficult than writing one that's simply true. There's a job talk analogy to be made here, as I've noticed that the audience at historicist talks is often antsy because the claims made are insufficiently clever. The thing is, all the historicist can say is "well, that's the way it was, sure I could say something more clever about it, but it'd be inaccurate." (I actually have a long post in the works about this one.) The horror of In Cold Blood has to be contextualized, as it does seem quaint now...but at the time, it was considered as offensive as Hersey's Hiroshima, which tells you a little something about how it was received.

Yes, this is a lame defense of it, but I was in fact horrified by it, largely because I'd read criticism of and about it before reading it, so I knew Capote had unbelievable access. And what did he learn with it? Not that criminals are especially psychotic, but that they're mundane and normal. I found that more disturbing than anything I couldn't bear to watch in Saw MMMI: This Time It's Really, Really Excessive. (More later, when I'm a little less exhausted.)

[N. Pepperell]

The thing is, all the historicist can say is "well, that's the way it was, sure I could say something more clever about it, but it'd be inaccurate."

I'm just coming off something like the term from hell at the moment, so I honestly can't vouch for my ability to read anything correctly... But this sentence seems a bit... epistemologically questionable... Or are you speaking in someone else's voice here? I'm assuming your understanding of historicism doesn't require some kind of image of the historicist as a mirror of reality? And a particular stylistic orientation as a stamp of authenticity? But I won't say more, because I'm probably just missing the point... Regular thought processes will (may?) resume when I've had some sleep...

Very fun post, though...

[Luther Blissett]

Scott, I'm not sure I buy your defense here. You're right that it takes more to write a work both moving and true than one simply true, but I feel that *In Cold Blood* is simply true. At no point was I moved, either sentimentally at the loss of a family or creepily at Lee's situation. But affect was never the strong suit of first generation literary journalism. Didion is the master of a certain Valium-induced detachment, while Mailer and Wolfe strike me as exploitative and condescending respectively. Hunter Thompson was at least funny.

Let's remember that "the non-fiction novel" is just an awkward way of saying "history." And historians have successfully negotiated the need to balance truth and meaningfulness for several centuries. Capote may capture the truth, but it's a truth without, well, real plot: this happened, then this happened, but with no real insight on the causation of what happened. It's history as chronicle: a list of events without meaningful connections.

And this is precisely why certain historicist talks don't "wow" anyone. Historicist criticism can still provide new and challenging insight into literature and stick to the facts. Linda Colley's *Britons*, or Ian Baucom's *Spectres of the Atlantic*, or James Chandler *England in 1819* (which is both a masterful historicist work and an excellent critique of the impossibility of historicism), David Wallace's *Chaucerian Polity*, Mary Poovey's history of the fact: historicism, like even the zaniest High Theoretical readings, can be "wowing" or clever.

The problem with Capote -- and with too much historicist criticism -- is that they think that narrating events is enough. At times, the historicist critic is afraid to venture out of the realm of brute facts, because of the Hayden White conundrum: the belief that all narrative forms are "fictions" and so are lies. But historicist criticism need not provide historical narratives. Fredric Jameson's chapter in *The Political Unconscious* on romance is brilliant historicism, precisely because he thinks in such broad strokes: the transition from argriculture to industry and the rise of a nostalgic mode of literature. The "wow" moment comes, like all "wow" moments, even the "wow" moments in a great poem, from the combination of seemingly disconnected or unlike things. So the good historicist makes us think about the connections between museums and realism, or the relationship of insurance to law to slavery to romantic literature. Or the Gold Standard and naturalism. Or the frontier thesis and the modernist and postmodernist epic (that's my wee bit of historicism).

The boring historicist, like the boring poet, sheds no new light on a situation. But whenever fresh insight is brought to a poem, whether by an excursion through Lacanian political theory or through thorough archival research, the crowd is wowed.

And Capote just seemed to bring nothing to the events besides the brute facts (which, themselves, are fictive constructions). Compare his take on murder to, say, David Lynch's in *Twin Peaks*. All of Lynch's ridiculous mysticism and surrealism is in the service of establishing the true horror of banality: a young girl is molested and eventually murdered by her father. But Lynch succeeds precisely by making the "horror of the mundane" trope fresh. Then again, as you wrote, *In Cold Blood* was fresh in its time (my father couldn't sleep for weeks after reading it back in the 70s).

You say tomato, I say tomato. Let's call the whole thing off.

[Mike S]

LB, that was awesome.

[Scott Eric Kaufman]

LB, I agree with the non-wowing of dull historicism, but disagree about the utility of such non-wowing projects. Part of the problem with our profession is that wowing gets jobs, but people need to fill in the details. So, for example, Chaucerian Polity is a brilliant book, but one Wallace couldn't have written without much of the "drudge work" accomplished by "lesser" scholars in the pages of Speculum. The profession needs both, but only recognizes one. (Not so true in medieval studies or early modern studies, but you see my point.)

At times, the historicist critic is afraid to venture out of the realm of brute facts, because of the Hayden White conundrum: the belief that all narrative forms are "fictions" and so are lies.

Well, I wouldn't call them "lies" but "creative transformations." What I'm interested in is the way people take this body of scientific knowledge and transform it to conform with preexisting beliefs, other bodies of thought (aesthetic theory, romantic individualism, &c.). So I'm uninterested in narrating events, because that's the realm of the historian proper. I think many historicists are intellectual historians who focus on shifts in thought as reflected in literature, i.e. Menand focuses on the Civil War's effect on William James' thought in The Metaphysical Club, whereas I'd focus on its influence on brother Henry. (Not that I am, just making a point.) That said, I still want to ground my accounts of shifts in thought to the material I've dredged up.

For example, at a talk I attended recently, someone asked the speaker "Wouldn't it be reeeeeeeeeally interesting if the person you're talking about was familiar with this particular strain of theory?" "Yes," the speaker replied, "but I have no evidence that she was." The questioner followed, "Maybe, but could you speculate about what it would mean if she had?" The speaker obliged, but sitting there in the audience, I couldn't help but feel there was something deeply wrong with whole performance—and that "something" has to do with the oddity of historicist projects in literature departments. I'm still thinking about how to frame this, though, because it seems like it should be part of some larger conversation about the profession. Right now, it's an anecdote and an uneasy feeling but little more.

Let's remember that "the non-fiction novel" is just an awkward way of saying "history." And historians have successfully negotiated the need to balance truth and meaningfulness for several centuries.

I'm not buying that definition of the non-fiction novel. History, as a profession, had moved away from the techniques of fiction employed by the New Journalism becacuse they were considered "unprofessional." While it may be another mode of "historical" writing, the concomitant commitment to truth and the storytelling was innovative. You had both present, in differing degrees, in something like Hersey's Hiroshima or Mitchell's Up in the Old Hotel, only Hersey wasn't much of a novelist and Mitchell frequently created composite characters to better communicate the mood he sought. You could venture further back—and I did when I taught the "Evolution of Literary Journalism" course, a historical survey beginning with Thucydites and working forward—but the genre lacked an ethos before the New Journalism. (I know Capote invented that final scene in In Cold Blood, but that just means he failed to live up to the courage of his commitments. Wolfe sharing the interior monologue of a dead monkey shot into space, on the other hand, is just plain weird.)

The short version is a tidy corrollary of my historicism—my interest in literary journalism is the result of my investment of the literary-qua-literary, the techniques which warp history into something greater, more revealing, than brute chronicled facts. The attitude of the literary journalist is fundamentally different from that of the historian, a fact which alters both how and what they produce.

More on Capote (and a response to N.P.) shortly.