While I greatly prefer In Cold Blood and Music for Chameleons to this unfinished novel, I will still read anything by Truman Capote because it is all a demonstration of sheer brilliance. Answered Prayers is less plot driven than it is an over the top romp through the high society that Capote moved through once he was famous (the work seems largely autobiographical). It wasn't particularly cohesive as a narrative nor are any of the characters particularly memorable, but I enjoyed it nonetheless. Here is an example of how Capote packs a punch in just a few sentences:
To all these people, the living among them, I must by now be the merest memory. If that. Of course, Boaty would have remembered me, but not with pleasure (I can well imagine what he might say: "P.B. Jones? That tramp. No doubt he's peddling his ass to elderly Arab buggers in the souks of Marrakech"); but Boaty is gone, beaten to death in his mahogany house by a heroin-crazed Puerto Rican hustler who left him with both eyeballs dangling down his cheeks.
I was delighted to learn about Amanda Coplin's debut novel The Orchardist right around the time I had planned to visit a local orchard to do some apple picking. Also, having lived for many years in Seattle and been to Wenatchee, I was interested to read a book about the beautiful part of Washington state east of the mountains. In many ways, The Orchardist was a great book for the fall season. It was a book that took its time, with many lush and vivid descriptions of the natural landscape and life on the orchard. The story centers around Talmadge, a man who lives in solitude on his orchard until he unexpectedly becomes intertwined with two young women, Della and Jane, who escape difficult circumstances. This was a well written, engaging first novel from Coplin, but it tended to drag on and ultimately I felt the book focused more on the depressing elements of the character's lives without enough focus on the redemptive spirits of the protagonists. The descriptions of hardships and emotional challenges seemed to be more finely written and believable than the moments of happiness and connectedness.
