Answered Prayers by Truman Capote
CAPOTE, Truman. Answered Prayers: The Unfinished Novel. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1986.
First edition. Published posthumously, this book is perhaps the most famous unfinished novel in American letters. Meant to be a great society novel exploring the same terrain as Proust did in his great masterwork of modernist literature, À la recherche du temps perdu, Answered Prayers shocked New York society with the author’s thinly disguised revelations about the intimate lives of his “swans”, a group of rich and beautiful female friends, which included Babe Paley, Lee Radziwill, Marella Agnelli, C.Z. Guest, Gloria Guinness and Slim Keith.
The protagonist is one P B Jones, promiscuous writer and shrewd hustler, who is probably the author’s alter ego. His adventures take him from a louche bar in Tangiers to martini-soaked lunches at the famed New York restaurant, La Côte Basque, from literary salons to prostitution dens. Wonderfully sharp, witty, and gossipy, this book is filled with beautiful and scandalous women, psychotic and sadistic husbands along with a real-life cast of celebrities such as the Duchess of Windsor, Montgomery Clift, Colette, Tallulah Bankhead, Jackie Kennedy Onassis and her sister, Lee Radziwill.
Answered Prayers can be viewed as a precursor and earliest template for reality TV, casting Capote as a visionary.
8vo. ISBN: 9780241119624. 181 pp. Very good in fine dust jacket. Pages browned. Dust jacket design by Craig Dodd; photograph of the author to rear face of dust jacket by Irving Penn.