Reviewed by Sarvat Hasin

A S Capote’s first (and still unfinished) novel, Summer Crossing is something of a dark horse. It was thought to have been destroyed by the writer in a fit of pique after he decided that the work was ‘thin, clever and unfelt.’ Despite the attempts to bury it, the novel was rescued from his Brooklyn apartment and published.

The publication of posthumous novels, particularly in situations where the work is incomplete or deemed unfit for publication by the author himself, nearly always leads to mixed reactions from both the critics and the public.

Vladimir Nabokov’s The Original of Laura veers between a masterpiece and an embarrassingly incomplete piece of fiction. Ernest Hemingway wasn’t any better served by the later publication of any of his novels.

Therefore it comes as something of a surprise that despite its status as a draft, Summer Crossing actually reads like a cohesive piece of literature.

The novel revolves around one summer in the life of Grady McNeil, a young New York socialite who opts to stay home while her parents sail off to France. Grady is built along the lines of her successor, Capote’s capricious and charming Holly Gollightly of Breakfast at Tiffany’s.

‘You are a mystery, my dear’, says her mother as she departs on the ocean liner. She treats her daughter with affection but also a kind of delicate bewilderment. We are meant to understand that both Grady and her slightly awkward but fascinating friend Peter Bell are meant to stand in for Capote himself: elusive, young and vaguely understood by the other characters.

The book drifts carefully between the characters (never straying too far from Grady herself) and the relationships holding them together. The reader and Grady gradually realise that her childhood friend Peter is, in fact, in love with her.

He acknowledges the fact that their long close friendship would be near impossible to turn into a romantic relationship without the act being both fumbling and humorous; they have so long seen each other in a platonic light that he has already despaired of ever making her love him.

Grady is aware that marrying Peter is her best bet if she must marry anyone within their social circle, that is, rich upper class Manhattan society. However, instead of taking this opportunity at happiness, she tumbles head first into a heated affair with a parking lot attendant and war veteran, Clyde Manzer.

It is slowly revealed that it is his presence that prevented her from accompanying her parents in the first place. They conduct their affair from her parents’ Fifth Avenue apartment; a venue that continually highlights (along with the presence of Clyde’s friends and their blowsy girlfriends) the gap between their worlds. Clyde is unsuitable in every way; he is rough, Jewish and already engaged to someone else.

Despite the age-old scenario of forbidden love, Capote’s glorious prose and careful dealing of the characters raises the novel above cliché. The lovers are hard-pressed to acknowledge their affection for each other; instead of impassioned speeches they are sly and fragile, unwilling to admit that their deeper feelings for each other constitute a problem to prolonging the affair.

Overall, the story provides tremendous insight into the mind of a young Capote yet to write the works for which he would later become so famous. While Grady, despite coming across as somewhat self-absorbed and not always likeable, demands from the reader some level of emotional investment in her fate.

She resembles a Dorothy Parker character: difficult to sympathise with but still fully able to wield the reader’s emotional compass. The book also captures beautifully a certain sensation of youth and summertime, perfectly precluding the dangerous spiral that this book and its heroine soon fall into.

The narrative is both breezy and tumultuous and it is easy, in retrospect, to blame the tiny holes in plot and characterisation on the author’s youth and yet undeveloped genius.

Summer Crossing(NOVEL)By Truman CapoteRandom House, New YorkISBN 1400065224142pp. $22.95