Answered Prayers

Although Truman Capote's final novel remained unfinished at the time of his death, the fragments that have survived provide a striking group image of his epoch's high and low society. Answered Prayers follows the career of a writer of ambiguous paternity with a voracious appetite for erotica, from a louche pub in Tangiers to a banquette on the Côte Basque, from literary salons to high-priced whorehouses. It includes such real-life supporting characters as Colette, the Duchess of Windsor, Montgomery Clift, and Tallulah Bankhead, as well as cunning beauty and nasty husbands. Above all, Capote is at his most doggedly observant and murderously witty in this malevolently finny book.