Answered Prayers. Don't think I'll finish it. Well written but basically it's just bitchy stuff about rich degenerates. Capote seems to have had a fascination with people he found contemptible, possibly including himself. I get the contempt. I don't share the fascination. The guy could write, but after In Cold Blood he didn't really write about anything worthy of his talent. Out of Mailer, Vidal, and Capote, Capote comes in third, a distant third. So it seems to me. Vidal had something akin to that Capotean bitchiness, but there was a lot more to the work and the man. Mailer was a whole other thing, Dostoevsky to Vidal's...I don't know, Turgenev? I don't know that I want to analogize Vidal to Tolstoy. Although I suppose one could. At least to the Tolstoy of War and Peace, not the old guy who cranked out religious pamphlets and advocated strict pacifism and married celibacy. Anyway...out of the three, Capote's the one who checked out early, which is somehow unsurprising in light of what happened to his abilities.