Erhörte Gebete

It was meant to be his opus magnum, a ruthless portrayal of society on the scale of Proust, but Capote could and would not complete it. Nevertheless, "Answered Prayers" is his most consistent work, a venom-saturated reckoning with high society. Here, Capote depicts the rich and powerful, the crazy and the wicked, all those who had regarded him as their lapdog for years. When the first chapter of this roman à clef was published in Esquire in the mid-1970s, Capote's friends realized that the lapdog could indeed bite: suddenly, their most intimate secrets—from infidelity to concealed murder—were laid out in black and white. "It is very difficult to be a gentleman and a writer," W. Somerset Maugham once remarked. With "Answered Prayers," Capote clearly chose the latter.