If a writer is going to craft a novel from well-known events, they might as well do it with brio, which this debut has in spades. The book takes as its subject the fall from grace of Truman Capote in 1975, after he allowed a tittle-tattling excerpt from his novel-in-progress, Answered Prayers, to be published in Esquire magazine. The adored pet and confidant of high society had turned on the women who had welcomed him on to their yachts and private jets and into their homes, revealing their secrets under the thinnest of fictional veils. His outraged “Swans” immediately closed ranks and jettisoned him.
The narrative is nonlinear but easy to follow, its voice flowing between characters in free-indirect mode, but also, in a technique borrowed from Joshua Ferris’s Then We Came to the End, in a collective first-person plural representing the Swans. It’s cleverly done. Exaggeratedly pretentious chapter headers (“Variation No 10”, “Dramma Giocoso” “Fandango”) highlight the artificiality and performative aspect of these gilded lives, and the whole shifts and shimmers in a riot of perspectives.Just as Capote mischievously, or sometimes with malignity, played off one woman against another, so Greenberg-Jephcott continually switches focus between them. The Swans moved in the same circles of vast wealth and prestige, centred on but not confined to New York. There is Lady Slim Keith, who when married to Howard Hughes talent-spotted the teenage model Lauren Bacall, and Lee Radziwill, rivalrous sister of Jackie Onassis. There’s the Italian aristocrat, long-necked Marella Agnelli, slow on the uptake, who supposes the ‘Swan’ soubriquet is hers alone, and Gloria Guinness, risen from a shady background to fabulous wealth and six homes. CZ Guest is the Swan who sees the desperate child behind Capote’s malevolence and attempts to save him; and Babe Paley, his favourite, is the one most disgusted by his indiscretions since they concern her husband’s philandering.
Greenberg-Jephcott creates competing versions of Capote’s childhood and adolescence, just as he embroidered, altered and retrofitted his own past. The reader is taken inside the famous Black and White Ball and the debauched Studio 54 nightclub, gaining insights into diverse social scenes and historical moments. Capote with his southern drawl and affectations – “Mamacita … Babyling … Miss Slimski” – was perhaps easiest to draw, but most touching are the portraits of the women. It would have been easy to view them as trophy wives, but here their presence is vivid, more so than that of their dull multimillionaire husbands. Telling the story of Gloria Guinness in ballad form was a flourish too far, but that aside, this is a skilled and sparkling debut.
• Swan Song by Kelleigh Greenberg-Jephcott (Hutchinson Books, £12.99). To order a copy for £11.04, go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min. p&p of £1.99.
