Nor am I denying its qualities: qualities that are appropriate to its own genre, such as the fact that it is a good story, competently though too mechanically told, its smooth, standardized prose and somewhat contrived shifting of scenes giving off an aura of fictional skill and urbanity and imaginative re-creation. By this I do not mean that the book does not measure up to some fancy or sacred or strict notion of literature or of the novel. (On most bestseller lists, In Cold Blood is listed as non-fiction, though of course newspapers do not recognize any ultra-modern category between fiction and non-fiction.) Perhaps I can best sum up my response to the book by saying that when I finished it I thought it was good in its own way, but that the question remained-as in the old Jewish joke-whether In Cold Blood was good for literature. It cannot be considered in any meaningful sense a novel, though it invites criticism as a novel by pretending somehow to be one and by using the machinery of fiction. Truman Capote's In Cold Blood is a cross between a detective story and a crime documentary.
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