A Few Brief Notes on In Cold Blood

I finished it about three weeks ago, but then I was getting ready to go on vacation, on vacation, getting semi-re-organized upon coming back from vacation--in short, I have not been able to get to a computer to do any serious blogging or social media use for some time. While I found the book well-written--its hyper-polished and professional New Yorker sheen is the most satisfying thing about it--I am a little confused by all of the claims for its being a 'masterpiece'. I am not wholly convinced that it even qualifies as 'literature'. There are small matters of interest in it, digressions and details, that I liked, but they do not come together to make anything grand. This is at bottom a small book dressed up as something bigger than it is. The murderers, when they are not in the act of committing crimes, have nothing particularly compelling about them, and most of the other people featured in the book, apart from a few persons like the postmistress and her mother, are not especially vivid either. This includes the victims.

As I said, I enjoyed the book (insofar as one can enjoy reading about four people being shot to death in their homes), but then I am unusually interested in things having to do with the United States of the 1950s and 60s, the New Yorker magazine of that era, and so forth. Is this a book that people without the emotional connection to the time and place in which it takes place are going to be interested in a hundred years from now? I can't see that. I have to think Truman Capote's personal popularity with influential literary and social sets of his time must have colored their judgements of his writings.