In Cold Blood

So here is my review, as promised.

In Cold Blood by Truman Capote

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


I'm giving this five stars, but that does not mean that I think people should run out and read it. It was really dark, and I found myself having some pretty hopeless, dark thoughts about my own life while I was reading it, so I say go forward with caution.

The story, as probably almost everyone is aware, centers on two men who, in mid-November of 1959, headed out to a farm near Garden City, Kansas, and killed the Clutter family: a farmer, Herbert, his wife, Bonnie, and their two teenage children, Nancy and Kenyon. The crime, discovered by Nancy's friends the next morning, seemed entirely senseless. And it was.

While the book focuses heavily on the criminals who committed the crime, Capote sets the stage by introducing the reader to the victims and the community around them. The Clutter family was loved and respected, and so I am certain that their friends and neighbors were all the more horrified and frightened by what happened.

And then, as the reader, you don't find out why these two men did what they did until you are well into the story. I won't say too much about their motives, but I will say that it makes the tale all the more tragic to find out what happened the night they went to the Clutter's farm.

So what disturbed me most? Capote goes into both the history and the psychoses of these guys, and it is not a pretty picture; in fact, it is both sad and very pathetic. But what makes it worse is knowing that it's true. These men were real. What they did was real. The lives they lived were real.

Dick Hickock was the man who hatched the plot, and of the two criminals, this guy was more horrible. I'm not a psychiatrist or a psychologist, but I think he was a sociopath with no real sense of conscience. I don't think he felt any remorse for what he had done, only regret that he had been caught when he was so certain that he would get away with it. He was willing to do anything at all to get what he thought was his due. And he was so arrogant that even after fleeing Kansas for Mexico, he decided that they would return, continuing their crime spree across several states before finally being caught in Nevada.

Perry Smith was a little bit more sympathetic. I don't think he was a sociopath so much as he was scarred and angry because of his horrible childhood. Not that I think that is any excuse because lots of people have horrible childhoods, and they don't commit murder as a result. I do think, however, that his particular psychosis was a rage born of both extreme neediness and extreme neglect. He snapped, and unfortunately the Clutter family had to pay the price. Don't get me wrong. He was still disturbing, but I just had more sympathy for him than for Hickock.

Capote is both skilled as a writer and thorough as a researcher. The end result? It reads like a novel, up until the end, anyway, when he delves into the legal battle surrounding the case and the death penalty in Kansas, which I actually found very interesting. I really really like the way Capote's prose reads. And then I don't know how many people he interviewed, but it was a lot. A lot. The amount of detail he was able to go to was very impressive.

Still, I don't know if I'm recommending it. I think, in the end, it wasn't the motive that bothered me so much as it was the pure psychopathy of these men. I kept wondering to myself if I could be anything like them. Not that I would do what they did, of course, but that we as humans in general could be capable of killing in cold blood. I suppose that is what makes it such a good book. Capote is able to take the reader into the minds of these two men, and what you see isn't pretty, but you know that somehow they were able to do it. I suppose, now that I've read it, that I am just not sure that all reality needs to be represented. And that is why I say proceed with caution.

And now please excuse me while I go read something completely light, funny and innocent so I can get the taste of this particular book out of my mouth.

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