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Other Voices, Other Rooms (novel)Other Voices, Other Rooms is a 1948 novel by Truman Capote. It is written in the Southern Gothic style and is notable for its atmosphere of isolation and decadence.
Other Voices, Other Rooms is significant because it is both Capote's first published novel and semi-autobiographical. It is also noteworthy due to its erotically charged photograph of the author, risqué content, and debut at number nine on The New York Times Best Seller list, where it remained for nine weeks.
Plot
After his mother's death, 13-year-old Joel Harrison Knox, a lonely, effeminate boy, is sent from New Orleans, Louisiana, to live with his father, who abandoned him at the time of his birth. Arriving at Skully's Landing, a vast, decaying mansion on an isolated plantation in Mississippi, Joel meets his sullen stepmother Amy, Amy's cousin Randolph, a gay man and dandy, the defiant tomboy Idabel, a girl who becomes his friend, and Jesus and Zoo, the two black caretakers of the home. He also sees a spectral "queer lady" with "fat dribbling curls" watching him from a top window. Despite Joel's queries, the whereabouts of his father remain a mystery. When he finally is allowed to see his father, Joel is stunned to find he is a mute quadriplegic, having tumbled down a flight of stairs after being inadvertently shot by Randolph and nearly dying. Joel runs away with Idabel to a carnival and meets a woman with dwarfism; on a Ferris wheel, the woman attempts to touch Joel in a sexual manner and is rebuffed. Looking for Idabel in a storm, Joel catches pneumonia and eventually returns to the Landing, where he is nursed back to health by Randolph. The implication in the final paragraph is that the "queer lady" beckoning from the window is actually Randolph, dressed in an old Mardi Gras costume.
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