Answered Prayers – Truman Capote (1986)

Answered Prayers by Truman Capote, published posthumously in 1986, is an unfinished and controversial work that stirred scandal among the elite social circles Capote once called friends. Intended as a modern American counterpart to Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past, Capote envisioned this novel as an exposé of café society, detailing the lives of the rich, the powerful, and the morally compromised through the eyes of an ambitious social climber. What remains of the novel is a collection of three interconnected chapters – “Unspoiled Monsters,” “Kate McCloud,” and “La Côte Basque” – that blend fact with fiction in Capote’s singular, penetrating style. These fragments offer both a glittering and grotesque portrait of mid-20th century high society, and they remain one of Capote’s most provocative legacies.

Plot Summary

In a dim, viewless room of a Manhattan YMCA, a man named P. B. Jones began scribbling, pressing graphite to paper as if it might summon the ghosts of his life. A foundling left in a St. Louis theater, raised among nuns and incense, he escaped into a world of glittering surfaces and spoiled hearts, determined to rise from obscurity by whatever means necessary. His beauty, raw and angular, became both shield and sword, and he wielded it with a cynic’s grace, moving from massage tables in Miami Beach to literary salons in New York with the stealth of a cat in silk.

In New York, he caught the eye of Turner Boatwright – Boaty to his fawning acolytes – a fiction editor with a room like a Victorian mausoleum and a heart to match. Their relationship was sordid and strategic. Boaty published Jones’s first story, a half-rewritten thing that gained him just enough literary footing to open other doors. But it was not literature Jones sought. It was a way into the glittering heart of society – the realm of velvet gowns, barbed compliments, and wealth with no warmth.

Boaty’s brownstone pulsed with presence. The likes of Dietrich and Garbo passed through, Jean Cocteau asked about tattoos, and the perfume of legacy hovered in the air. It was here that Jones met Alice Lee Langman, a Tennessee-born writer of exquisite reputation and frosted self-possession. She invited him into her apartment and, soon after, into her bed and her inner sanctum. Jones, ever the shapeshifter, gave her tenderness wrapped in deception. She gave him everything – her agent, her connections, her name printed alongside glowing reviews of his thin volume of stories. But the world saw through the charade. The literary elite recoiled. Langman’s name, once pristine, was now tethered to her handsome protégé with ambition in his eyes and venom behind his grin.

She wilted. He raged. Their final days were steeped in gin and blame, with Jones unleashing cruelty and Langman absorbing it, nodding with the patience of a martyr. When he left her, it was like smoke slipping beneath a door. No farewells, no backward glance.

Then came the letter. From Paris. From Denham Fouts, a name etched in the margins of café gossip and aristocratic ledgers. The world’s best-kept boy. A myth with cheekbones. He had seen Jones’s portrait on a book jacket – all light and deception – and offered him passage to France. Jones, practiced in vanishing acts, simply disappeared. He exchanged the first-class ticket for cash, sailed in tourist class, and arrived in Paris with bruised pride and high expectations.

Denham, for all his faded elegance, still lived in the ghost of grandeur. He inhabited the apartment of Peter Watson, an art patron who had loved him once and then fled. The rooms were shadowed, opium-scented, filled with the trappings of a life too long stretched between indulgence and decline. Denham himself moved like something embalmed in youth – skin pale, gestures soft, eyes never quite meeting anything real.

Jones and Denham shared a bed, but not a body. The intimacy was spiritual, narcotic, tragic. Denham, hollowed by addiction, claimed that sex had long since slipped from his abilities. He spoke in monologues, strange and drifting, about California monasteries and imaginary cafés at the end of life’s road. Jones listened, and in his listening, began to understand the mechanics of ruin.

Paris offered neither love nor fortune. Only rain-slick streets and a rotation of fading salons. They circled the same old names – failed princes, aging courtesans, women with last names like dynasties and souls like ash. There was Kate McCloud, the legendary beauty and seductress, whom Jones had never truly met but always heard – her name dropped like perfume across every whispered conversation. She had seen the whole world naked and found it wanting. Her verdict on love was final and merciless. She had lived on yachts, married men with oil in their veins, borne children who were strangers to her. She appeared only in stories and memories, but her presence was as solid as marble.

Jones, now disillusioned, tried to write again. Tried to turn the betrayals into language, the faces into characters. But every word felt like a confession, and he could feel the knives of those he had once charmed turning back toward him. Names changed, details shifted, but the people knew who they were. And they did not forgive.

The salons went quiet. The checks stopped arriving. Friends became shadows at the ends of hallways. Even Denham, once amused and affectionate, grew distant, lost in a haze of tea and dreams. One night, he recounted an imagined place – a sanctuary for the discarded, a café lit by neon lies and populated by those who had nothing left to trade. His voice, lilting and faint, faded with the morning light.

Back in the YMCA, Jones continued to write. Not stories, not love letters, but something darker. He imagined publishing everything – all the secrets, all the slips of lace and whispered obscenities, all the monstrous beauty of the people he had met. He knew the risk. He also knew it was already too late to return to anonymity.

He thought of the country, of small homes and clean mornings, of silence. He thought of leaving the city, of starting over, of no longer being the boy with the sharp smile and hollow pockets. But instead, he sharpened a pencil. He returned to the sixth floor. The window looked out at nothing. It would do.

Main Characters

• P. B. Jones – The narrator and central figure, Jones is an orphan with a sharp wit, questionable morals, and a craving for recognition. Born from nothing and determined to rise, he manipulates, flatters, and seduces his way through the glittering elite. Jones is both a participant and an observer, torn between disgust for the decadence he sees and a desperate desire to belong to it. His journey is one of cynical survival, and his voice drives the novel with a mix of charm, irreverence, and weary insight.

• Turner “Boaty” Boatwright – A powerful magazine editor and predatory figure, Boaty is one of Jones’s first contacts in New York literary society. He plays a dual role as gatekeeper and exploiter, offering professional advancement in exchange for sexual submission. Boaty’s presence is both comic and sinister, emblematic of the transactional nature of relationships in Capote’s world.

• Alice Lee Langman – An esteemed literary figure with a prestigious reputation, Langman becomes Jones’s patron and lover. Her cultivated persona masks deep vulnerabilities and unfulfilled desires. Despite her intelligence and status, she is ultimately manipulated by Jones, her infatuation with him leading to personal and professional disappointment.

• Denham Fouts – A real-life socialite and reputed male escort, Fouts is portrayed as a spectral, charismatic figure who invites Jones to Paris. Decadent and tragic, Denny represents the ultimate version of the “kept boy” mythos, living off the wealth of others while remaining emotionally remote and slowly succumbing to his addictions.

• Kate McCloud – A legendary beauty and courtesan, Kate McCloud is described with a mixture of awe and irony. She is part of the pantheon of glamorous women who move through Capote’s world, embodying both allure and calculated ambition. She speaks truths others fear to voice, and her presence lingers even beyond her scenes.

Theme

• Ambition and Social Climbing: At the core of Answered Prayers is the relentless pursuit of status, wealth, and influence. Through P. B. Jones’s ascension (and descent), Capote dissects the dark underside of ambition – how identity and integrity are often sacrificed for proximity to power and glamour.

• Betrayal and Exploitation: The novel is riddled with betrayals – friends who turn on one another, lovers who manipulate, and confidences revealed for gain. Capote himself experienced this fallout when the chapters were published, leading to his social ostracism. These betrayals reflect a world where relationships are transactional and trust is fleeting.

• Sexuality and Power: Capote presents sexuality not as intimacy but as currency. Whether through Jones’s transactional liaisons or the shadowy seductions of figures like Boaty and Fouts, sex is shown as a mechanism for gaining access, protection, or influence. The dynamics of dominance and submission underpin many of the character relationships.

• Illusion vs. Reality: Much of the book grapples with façades – social, personal, and literary. Characters maintain appearances while concealing emptiness, cruelty, or desperation beneath. Capote lifts the curtain on high society, revealing that the luxurious surfaces often hide rot and loneliness.

• Decay and the Cost of Fame: Especially through characters like Denham Fouts and Turner Boatwright, Capote explores how fame, privilege, and indulgence corrode the soul. The narrative is filled with ruined beauty and brilliance gone sour – a meditation on the toll of a life lived in pursuit of appearances.

Writing Style and Tone

Truman Capote’s prose in Answered Prayers is both polished and caustic, shimmering with wit, elegance, and acid. He employs a first-person narrator whose voice is confessional, sardonic, and often shockingly candid. The language moves seamlessly between high literary elegance and vulgar punchlines, reflecting the duality of the world Capote describes – poised between refinement and depravity. His sentences are sharp and barbed, often laced with irony or dark humor. Capote’s precision with words allows for searing character portraits in a few well-chosen phrases, and his mastery of dialogue adds depth and color to the social tableaux.

The tone is deeply ambivalent – glittering with admiration for beauty and style, yet ultimately cynical and mournful. There’s a constant undercurrent of disenchantment, as if the narrator, and perhaps Capote himself, is appalled by the very world he is so mesmerized by. At times, the novel adopts a confessional tone, bordering on memoir, blending fact and fiction so tightly that truth becomes elusive. This blurring enhances the voyeuristic thrill of the text, drawing readers into a world where the grotesque and the glamorous coexist in uneasy harmony.