A fascinating, all-absorbing, deliciously readable account of Truman Capote’s friendship with his ‘Swans': a group of extraordinarily rich and beautiful, accomplished, well-born or well-married women, who had befriended Capote and invited him into their glittering lives of yachts and balls, summers in the Hamptons, winters in Tangiers. The Swans loved Capote; they adored gossip as much as he did, and enjoyed confiding in him - did they know he would spread their secrets within the group as they traded salacious gossip with him? None of them appeared to have imagined that their secrets would end up in Esquire Magazine in two articles, ‘Mojave’ and ‘La Côte Basque’: a brace of thinly-veiled, salacious accounts of real-life high-society gossip, where every ‘character’ was all-too apparently drawn from life, well-known to anyone who knew that circle. The result was disastrous for Capote: his Swans excised him from their lives, cutting him adrift from all that seemed to give his life meaning.
Swan Song tells this story from both Truman’s side, and that of his Swans, who tell their tales as a collective ‘we’. The non-linear narrative takes key moments in every character's life to show where trusts were honoured, and then betrayed. The lack of linearity is no obstacle to the smoothness of the story. The tales come, one after another, like snapshots in an album, and all from a different viewpoint. Narrators are unreliable. Each Swan sees things her own way, and Truman always alters his story for maximum literary effect. Truman’s account of his neglected, lonely, Southern childhood, is told and re-told with no telling ever the same, his own life as much a work of fiction as any of his characters - until his childhood best friend Nellie Harper Lee reminds him, and us, of the truth. Maybe Truman’s early life wasn’t quite so desperate as he wanted his friends, his public, and himself, to believe.
The times, the places, are wonderfully wrought. Kelleigh Greenberg-Jephcott’s writing casts its own languid glamour over the gilded world Capote shared at his Swans’ discretion, seasoning the known facts with clever fictionalisation, bringing everyone and every-thing to life with effortless grace.
It’s an intriguing tale, that weaves fact and fiction the way Truman did - as the Swans did too, when desperate to hide sordid facts, humble origins, humiliations, betrayals and petty-jealousies. For much of the time, these women are hard to love, they are so shallow and self-serving, but the author gets under their self-obsessed veneers and reveals them as blood and bone women. It is very easy to understand their bewilderment and hurt, how very deeply wounded these women were at Truman’s disloyalty.
Why did Capote betray their trust when he published such a thinly-disguised, barely-fictionalised account of his Swans’ dirtiest secrets? Did he really imagine they would be nonchalant, amused, forgiving, even? Was it simply a wanton act of reckless self-destruction by a man tired of his butterfly life? - Unlikely, given the lengths to which he subsequently went to to get himself back into his Swans’ graces. Their glittering lives were his world and when exiled, life seemed to lose all meaning. Cut adrift, he spiralled into a frenzy of excess that led to his early death, at the age of just 59. It seems it was likely a simple miscalculation, a truly catastrophic gamble that was to cost him everything. His career never recovered. The Esquire articles were said to be extracts from a new novel, ‘Answered Prayers’, that Truman constantly promised but never delivered. In Swan Song, Capote suffers from a catastrophic failure of confidence, terrified of what was expected of him, fearing he could never better his early work, that anything he wrote would fall short and disappoint and so, he simply stopped writing.
But no one knows the truth, so the truth is never given, only possibilities. Kelleigh Greenberg-Jephcott has done an exhaustive amount of research for this book, which took ten years to write. The facts are the scaffolding. The fascination and the glamour comes all from hearsay and rumour, conjecture and gossip, which seasons the known with a series of maybes as the story jumps back and forth through time and place, but never loses momentum.Though tight with detail, it is an easy read, compelling and hugely-entertaining. I could hardly bear to put it down. I could hardly bear for it to end.

Fictionalised treatment of Truman Capote’s betrayal

I should stress that the 2-star rating is my personal view which seems to be out of kilter with the bulk of other reviewers who loved it.

For me, I couldn’t get into it at all. The writing is good making it quite literary, but it lacks pace and didn’t grab me at all. It covers Capote’s betrayal of his friends towards the end of his life, through a publication disclosing their secrets. I have no idea whether this happened, but it makes for an interesting storyline.

It is rare for me to give up on a book, but in this case, I just couldn’t summon up the energy to carry on reading. There is no discernible plotline in the early part of the book and the whole thing seems ephemeral and lacking in substance.

It can’t be a bad book, due to its critical acclaim, but the subject matter left me cold.

For anyone interested in the genius of Hollywood this could well be a gem.

Pashtpaws

Breakaway Reviewers received a copy of the book to review.

An absolutely riveting story. I enjoyed this very much alothough is different to my usual genre. Very well written xx

My thanks to NetGalley and publisher Random House UK, Cornerstone, for the ARC.
Now then - this book really is just 'something else' - in a class of its own - a really major piece of historical fiction, though based on thoroughly researched fact.
It's as fascinating, amusing and witty as Truman Capote was when infiltrating the lives of his Swans - his collection of ladies and their families who fell over themselves to provide him with confidences and gossip, travel and luxury. Truman was a feted writer, the best of best friends to the ladies he adored and admired for their own back-stories of hardships overcome to elevate them to the top of society. He was wealthy in his own right and he had access to Hollywood stars, Princesses, publishing moguls and even the periphery of the White House - a whole world of secrets.
But, once you break a best friend's confidence there is no turning back. This he did. There's a long spiral of descent as the alcohol and drugs which had been so much of the 'fun', in the hedonistic days gone by, gradually take their toll.
I was totally immersed in the conversations; an eavesdropper in a lounge or a restaurant, at an extravagant Ball, on a yacht sailing the Mediterranean or at a mansion in Palm Springs. Then, the 'after' emerges where all that is left is a diminutive boy in a man's body, seeking unforthcoming forgiveness.
An extremely poignant ending - really, really well-written.

I can't say in all honesty that I found this book an easy read, in terms of really short conversational sentences and quick jumps to seemingly unconnected passages, Additionally I found some parts of the closing chapters - although they obviously have high literary merit - rather confusing in their fantasy portrayals.
Nonetheless, albeit that this read was a complete departure from my usual genre, I do admire the sheer weight of work that this has taken to produce.
Thank you Kelleigh Greenberg-Jephcott.