A review by ladyzluvcooljim
Summer Crossing by Truman Capote

5.0

What a wonderful cross between F. Scott Fitzgerald’s ritzy world of The Great Gatsby and debonair debutante of This Side of Paradise with J.D. Salinger’s realism, intrigue, pessimism, and family politics from his stories on The Glass Family (Franny and Zooey, A Perfect Day for Bananafish). This is my first Capote novel (his first, too), so I can’t speak to his whole writing career and subsequent style, but going from reading a Cormac McCarthy novel to this shows the full breadth of possibilities of the English language. You might find as many colons or commas in an entire McCarthy book that you do in one Capote sentence, and yet both are perfectly natural and fluent (although my brain is more wire like Capote’s than McCarthy’s, for better or worse). The story follows the steady downfall of the adolescent Grady McNeil in the absence of her parents. I won’t pretend to know what Capote was really trying to tell us about these events but teenage angst and exploration does not meet a happy ending here. This is the first book in a long time where I felt my eyes breeze through both the syntax and the story, searching and craving for the next line. It was difficult to put down, which, combined with its brevity, made for a quick, enjoyable read.