The narrator and protagonist of Answered Prayers is one P.B. Jones, failed writer and competent sexual athlete, a scurrilous charmer who - to lift a pithy phrase from the poet Martial - tantos et tantas amat. Latin allusions are appropriate to the style of a book which oddly suggests the libertine rhetoric of some later Roman text: in the sly elegance of the syntax, the jaunty terseness of phrase, the not infrequent obscenity of the lexicon (there are words like 'muffdiver', which you will not find in your Funk and Wagnall's); most of all, in the calculated scabrousness of some episodes. Truman Capote's title, which is also the title of a book his hero has written, is taken from St Teresa: 'More tears are shed over answered prayers than unanswered ones.' What this may foretell - other than, perhaps, that couplings will end in comeuppances - we cannot readily judge, because what Capote has left us is only a sample, in three chapters, of a novel begun more than two decades ago, published in piecemeal extracts, and never finished.

LRB 18 December 1986 | PDF Download