Becoming more and more rare in this world of flash, gloss, and surface stories, Kim Powers reminds us with his first novel just how irreverent, offbeat, and wonderfully engaging a novel should be in “Capote in Kansas: A Ghost Story.” 

With the release of his first novel, Powers reminds readers of the power of novels of a bygone age, novels that dive beneath the surface into the undiscovered depths of the heart and mind that constructs humanity. 

From the childhood friendship of a little girl (a tom-boy seeking some mud to splash in) and a summer visitor in the form of a boy (cleanly dressed), Power constructs a haunting tale that follows a friendship into the depths of feeling and fear throughout a lifetime of artistic exploration and the consequences of such. 

In this regard, he turns to the literary legends Harper Lee and Truman Capote, and builds a haunting account of human emotion based on the collection of ghosts that haunt these writers.  Finding solace in the possibility of another’s ear, finding dreams that take hold of us in our waking moments, and finding horror in our own past endeavors, both characters awaken the possibility of feeling something other than the norms that permeate within the flashy images that surround today’s existence in the world. 

Driven from others into the passion of written words, these authors each find demons waiting beyond success (Capote’s killers, and Lee’s fame respectively), which serve as a cancer upon the creative heart leaving wounded intellects roaming in search of piece. Driven within this grasp beyond the usual, readers find an anti-climax materialize in the plot of the ghosts, but in so doing, we begin to ask difficult questions about the characters, the nature of haunted emotion, and maybe even about ourselves. 

With an elegance and depth too often missing from many fictional works these days, Powers crafts a masterful tale of ghosts literally crawling out of literary beauty, and in so doing, probes the deeper possibilities of human emotion within a world of passion intermingled with pain.

Powers inserts this entertaining and imaginative story into the realities of Capote’s and Lee’s lives; as Powers writes in the Author’s Note: “A surprising amount of the book is based on real events.” He captures Capote’s beloved cattiness and Lee’s legendary loner status, fashioning fully-realized characters that engage the reader by coming alive on the page. Fans of Capote and Lee will learn some interesting facts about their lives and the inspirations behind their greatest works. However, this is fiction: Though Powers uses the real lives of Capote and Lee to frame his narrative, the essence of the book is more ghost story than literal history. The events—including the hauntings and the slapstick hijinks of Truman and Myrtle—are occasionally farfetched, but Powers clearly respects his subjects and never resorts to easy jokes at the expense of characterization. Every action is embedded and supported by the narrative. Capote in Kansas allows readers one last adventure with the creator of Boo Radley and one last waltz around the Black and White Ball with Truman and his caustic wit.

http://www.hipsterbookclub.com/reviews/copy/0108/capote_in_kansas_kim_powers.html

Truman Capote in his waning days is plagued with nightmares - menacing appearances of the victims and killers from his fomenting real life pulseracer In Cold Blood — and those nocturnal visions drive him back to the cast-off confidante and dear friend Harper Lee, who lived through and abetted the reportage for the Breakfast at Tiffany’s author’s most serious work. In this novel, which is told in terror-dumps and flashbacks, the complexities and complications of friendship, the exhumation of the facts and the conflicting loyalties that come into play inform the most compelling aspects of this novel grounded in what really happened.
     For Lee, who was about to emerge on the American literary horizon as the creator of the race/justice/yourh classic To Kill A Mockingbird, it’s a shuddering remembrance of her friendship long worn down to nothing. Sanity, gothic Southernism, indulgence and vanity be damned, the intersection of these elements, two great literary works, two deeply singular voices are a fertile field for Emmy-winning writer Kim Powers to flex his use of small detail, large betrayal and economy of language to evoke a story that’ll hold you, inform you and ignite your own imaginative reflexes. This is an elevated escape with perfect binding.

Capote in Kansas is a richly detailed story that incorporates so much fact into the telling it acquires the harsh light and intimate detail of documentary…..The characters, including Nelle’s sister Alice and Truman’s maid Myrtle and his last boyfriend Danny, are so real that they almost speak from the pages they appear in. The ancillary details, including events from the shared past of Capote and Lee and the separate adult histories of each of them, give fascinating glimpses into their private lives and into the backgrounds of their famous novels.

Haunted authors cling in decline

by Jim Provenzano

Capote in Kansas: a Ghost Story by Kim Powers; Carroll & Graf, $25.

A number of prerequisite readings will make Kim Powers’ novel Capote in Kansas even more enjoyable than it is, and it is…. touching and often hilarious…. Powers, whose own life became the subject of his first book, a memoir (The History of Swimming), weaves a deft and clever rewriting of what is known and fabricated about these two mysterious authors, both of whom became national celebrities in the 1950s, but both of whom failed to continue their success. In a way, Powers enacts a sort of revenge on Capote, who was known to change details of In Cold Blood to satisfy his own writing. Perhaps the Clutters are satisfied. Living readers will be satisfied as well.

“…well-written and at times intriguing…. ”Capote in Kansas” raises thought-provoking philosophical issues about how writers should use the lives of real people.” 

When the ghosts of the Clutter family from In Cold Blood literally come calling, a near-death Truman Capote reaches out to estranged writer pal Nelle Harper Lee for help in Capote in Kansas.

Vérité Moment
At one point, Kim Powers plausibly implies that Capote himself started the rumors that he was the real author of Lee’s venerable To Kill a Mockingbird.

Lowdown
Powers astutely summons the intense sorrow behind a life-long friendship gone awry.

Library Journal, 10/15/2007 (starred review)In his exceptional first novel, Emmy and Peabody Award winner Powers presents us with Truman Capote in the last year of his life. Addled by drugs and alcohol and despairing the wreck his shining life has become, he is plagued by the ghosts of the people whose deaths he chronicled in his greatest book, In Cold Blood. The now-old Harper Lee, or Nelle as she calls herself, is the only one who has a shot at understanding Truman—his childhood friend, she served as companion and researcher on the trip to Kansas that produced In Cold Blood. But Nelle has her own ghosts to exorcise having to do with why she never wrote a second book. In Kansas, Powers speculates, Truman exposed Nelle to her own sexuality, which she continues to suppress. And at his famous 1966 Black and White Ball, green with envy over Nelle’s having won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, Truman spreads the rumor that it was he who wrote To Kill a Mockingbird, not she. Powers, whose 2006 memoir, The History of Swimming, was a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers pick, succeeds brilliantly in blending fact and fiction to produce a sensitive portrait of two lost souls. Heartily recommended for public collections.—David Keymer, Modesto, CA  

Capote in Kansas: A Ghost Story, by Kim Powers. Carrol & Graf, 256
pages, $23.99 hardcover.As this fantasia rooted in reality opens, Truman Capote is weeks away from dying, despondent that his friends have deserted him, drowning in drink and drugs (fact), and haunted by nightmare visits from the Clutters (fiction) - the Kansas family whose massacre inspired Capote’s true-crime triumph, _In Cold Blood_. In his delirium, he reaches out (fiction) to Harper Lee, author of _To Kill a Mockingbird_, who accompanied Capote to Kansas as he researched the Clutter family’s slaying and the lives of their killers (fact). The childhood friends have been estranged for years (fact), Lee long embittered by rumors that Capote really wrote the book that brought her fame - a pivotal bit of fiction in this terrifically intense meshing of imagination and truth. Powers folds his fiction seamlessly into facts; the result is a riveting, offbeat what-if novel. His heartfelt depiction of a Capote in tragic decline - but with flashes of crafty self-awareness - is haunting; his portrayal of Lee as a lesbian _manque_ - though she’s still alive, and as reclusive as ever - is heartrending. –Richard LaBonte