Other Voices, Other Rooms Book

As perplexing as it is captivating, Other Voices, Other Rooms is Capote's hallucinatory literary début, a Southern Gothic bildungsroman based partially on its writer's experience of growing up gay in rural Alabama. The novel wavers between the surreal and the familiar, the obvious and the mystifying; all the while, Capote's ornate language and labyrinthine syntax entrance his reader, inviting them to dwell in a consistently disturbing setting. The plot concerns thirteen-year-old Joel Knox's move after his mother's death to live with his father at Skully's Landing, a rotting mansion inhabited by eccentric figures on the outskirts of a small town. As a kind of subversion of the coming-of-age novel, though, neither the story nor the protagonist's character arc are all that important: Joel doesn't change over the course of the narrative so much as he changes how he feels about what he already is at its start. The novel is far more interested in sketching and sympathizing with different kinds of marginal existence, stressing their stagnancy, as well as critiquing American society for its contempt of Black and queer life. The ending reads as especially bleak, once one moves beyond the initial shock induced by its switch to the stream-of-consciousness mode.