Summer Crossing is One You Can Cross Off Your List

I generally admire Truman Capote. I mean, he brought us masterpieces like Breakfast at Tiffany's (which was later made into a delightful film starring the equally delightful Audrey Hepburn as Holly Golightly and a less delightful song by the same name) and In Cold Blood (a groundbreaking book that spawned the genre of "true crime" books). So I was excited to see a Capote book that I hadn't read yet at the local library.

Summer Crossing is one of Capote's earlier works, written before the fame that he acquired by writing the works cited above. Capote wrote Summer Crossing at 19, but the manuscript was not found until 2004. The manuscript was finally published in 2005.

Summer Crossing tells the story of Grady McNeil, the youngest daughter of a wealthy, elite New York family. Grady, seventeen, is about to debut into New York society in the 1950's, something her older sister never got to do (as her debut would have occurred in the middle of World War II) and which her mother had dreamed about. While Mrs. McNeil is literally frothing at the mouth in anticipation of the party at which Grady will debut, Grady herself dreads it. The book begins at a family breakfast in their Manhattan apartment, as the family is preparing to set off to Europe for the summer. Grady announces that she is not leaving Manhattan and states that she wants to remain in New York because she has yet to spend a summer there. That isn't her true reason of course; it's because she's started dating a Jewish armed forces veteran named Clyde Manzer, a gentleman whose background the McNeils would mistakenly not find suitable for Grady. The novella details Grady's ever intensifying relationship with Clyde and her summer in New York.

This novel shows much of Capote's talent and the characters that, once developed, he is notorious for. However, the book itself is noticeably unfinished. The story is choppy and there are a lot of unexplained gaps in the plot and the action, because Capote never got around to finishing it before his death. The characters, although chock-full of potential, remained undeveloped. It was hard for me to understand their motivations, their decision making process and how they got from one point to another. A lot of times, I felt like I was missing something, as if something important happened on the page or the section before that I had somehow forgotten. Again, this was probably because this manuscript was an unfinished work at the time of publication. This made for very a very jerky and unsatisfying read.

All in all, it wasn't as great as I had hoped.