DEAR MR. CAPOTE

by Cordon Lish ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 16, 1983

A 264-page letter from a New York City mass murderer to Truman Capote--who, the killer hopes, will turn the slayings into a big-money bestseller like In Cold Blood. (Norman Mailer has already declined the opportunity, it seems.) In a neo-Runyonesque argot that is more literary than lifelike, the killer recalls some of his murders: he stabs women through the left eye, with a knife he calls ""Paki,"" after uttering his new vocabulary word for the day; he's killed 23 so far, with plans for another 24 (one for each of his 47 years). The killer also tells a long story--in bits and pieces--about a wave of people watching a fight on 14th St., proving the public's appetite for violence. (""It was standing-room-only! And nobody even got killed! Whereas yours truly is handing you how many? And I mean signed, sealed, and delivered!"") He talks about his bank-clerk job, his tetchy wife ""T.C.,"" and his adored young son--for whose financial sake he la supposedly arranging this bestselling rampage. Inevitably, there are fractured glimpses of the childhood/adolescence that presumably produced this psychopath: an unloving (perhaps cruel) mother referred to only as ""she""; the drowning death of a brother named Davie (apparently only a fantasy, with inklings of split-personality); teenage infatuation with Janet Rose, a 13-year-old oral sex expert (""In words of one syllable, the thing with Janet R. was to give you a suck-off and then give you another one after that!""); complicating sex with Janet R.'s trollopy mother; a short-lived minor career doing radio voices; the search for an absent father. And finally, after a voice-parade of cruel/betraying women in the killer's life, he flips off into a free-associative rage that suggests the fantasy nature of his life-story and his total mayhem, identity-wise: ""You hear me, T.C.? You took him away! But you're just me and he's just me--and when I sign off, you are all fucking nothing!"" Veteran fiction-editor Lish works hard at the dissociation here, even giving the killer some unlikely insights into the paradoxes of metaphor, language, perception. And though one is constantly aware of the hip, educated writer fabricating the Archie-Bunkeresque narration, the effects are sometimes mordantly amusing. But ultimately this is convincing neither as a case-history nor as a satire on the media-zation of violence--and will probably be read, with admiration rather than pleasure or emotional impact, as a skillful, energetic literary exercise.

Pub Date: May 16, 1983

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Holt, Rinehart & Winston

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1983

Categories: FICTION