Contradictory, brilliant, and larger than life, Truman Capote manages to occupy both the center and the margins of the novel. The Swans of Fifth Avenue charts the rise and fall of his literary celebrity and social status, along with his less-definable friendship with Babe Paley. His power comes from his ability to tell stories, and not only in print. His stories, at least in his mind, have the power to shape the world around him, to allow him to move freely at a level of social prestige far distant from his childhood in Monroeville, Alabama. Stories are also the means by which he creates intimacy. Babe is his ideal audience, the listener who mirrors him back to himself. But the power does, intermittently make him cruel. Moreover, the fear of losing that power makes him desperate and disingenuous; “La Côte Basque 1965” is, the novel implies, an outgrowth of his fear that he will not continue to be a writer, as much as anything else.

The Swans depicts Truman from a number of different angles. He talks with the swans, and they talk about him when he isn’t there. Many passages of free indirect