Sparkles's Book Club -- Part II of In Cold Blood (Persons Unknown)

Beginning with the cleanup and aftermath of the Clutter family murders, and ending with the heinous crime's perpetrators' slow crawl back to the US of A from Mexico, the second part of In Cold Blood is where the story assumes an accelerated flow, though much of Capote's poetic prose is lost in the process in favor of a kinetic pace. Which is not to say that the book falls apart or even stumbles -- far from it, in fact; I was more enthralled by Persons Unknown than I was by The Last to See Them Alive. But Capote's awesomely vivid and descriptive prose is noticably restrained (wisely, I will concede). I suppose, for a book that was written over the period of five years, that's to be expected; and, again, I was enthralled reading about the criminals flight to Mexico, the shared loss and subsequent distrust towards one another shared by members of the Clutter's community, the investigators' obsessive search to find the killers, and, particulary, the exposition of correspondences -- adeptly juxtaposed, if maybe a tad manipulatively, during a lonely early-morning packing session -- to Perry Smith from his father, his sister, and Willie-Jay. The latter, the book's longest section thus far, is easily my favorite, something which can stand independent of the book as a whole. While the book takes on a life of its own and unravels as naturally (though far from predictably) as digestion after a hearty banquet or tragedy, figuratively and literally, respectively [quit it with the adverbs already, Sparkles: ed./Idealjetsam], Perry Smith's character-defining section is the book's strongest marvel thus far, and convincing proof supporting the argument -- I shall assume, for since beginning the book I've abstained from criticism pertaining to it, both positive and negative -- of the manipulative method in which it was written.

Appropriately, for a "non-fiction novel," characters who fit the protagonist's paradigm become apparent, the starkest of whom is Alvin Dewey, a man driven to solve the case and who seemingly assumes the burden of the entire community (it can also be argued, I suppose, that Perry Smith is also a protagonist). And while Dewey becomes, by literary proxy, the book's hero, he is not by a long shot the sole interesting figure. In fact no character can be said to be uninteresting in the slightest, the least of whom is easily Perry Smith; and I found myself numerous times wondering whether In Cold Blood was, while not the impetus of the anti-hero in neither literature nor media, at the forefront of the flow that breached the gates, flooded our consciousness, and would eventually lead to our modern day sympathizing for -- and often dangerous idolization of -- notorious criminals. This was a full seven years before The Godfather, remember.

But for now I'll save proselytizing on the book's cultural impact in favor of urging any literary buffs who haven't read Capote's masterpiece (I was once like you, one week ago), and those who have read it but need to brush up on their recollection, to get acquainted or reacquainted with In Cold Blood, the most riveting, most symbolically poignant "non-fiction novel" I've read since The Holy Bible.

Best quote of Persons Unknown (attributed to Alvin Dewey):

"Years from now I'll still be running down tips, and every time there's a murder, a case anywhere in the country even remotely similar, I'll have to horn right in, check, see if there could be any possible connection. But it isn't only that. The real thing is I've come to feel I know Herb and the family better than they ever knew themselves. I'm haunted by them. I guess I always will be. Until I know what happened."

I do know what happened, and I'm still haunted. Dewey, I'll venture to guess, after catching the murderers, still was, too.