...symptoms of fury rearranging Dick's expression

Started reading Capote's In Cold Blood yesterday, and so far it is definitely not disappointing. A real page-turner, trite as that sounds. The good kind of page-turner, too. The kind that keeps the pages turning because they're all part of a very well-written story, not because the chapters are each about three pages long. That there is a literary technique that's absurdly cheap and is the only way I can explain how so many people made it to the end of The DaVinci Code, which, let's face it, is essentially a pretentious, long-winded episode of Scooby Doo for grown-ups and wannabe theologians.

The line I've used for the title of this post is one I noticed from In Cold Blood, somewhere around page 80. It really stood out for me, but I'll come back to the reasons why after I've had my say about a few other elements.

First, the story's structure. I'm a massive movie fan (but absolutely refuse to use the term 'film buff') and if you were to tell me that Capote had been influential on the work of somebody like Quentin Tarantino, it'd come as no surprise at all. Not only because Tarantino is notorious for the outright theft of ideas he incorporates into his films (but hey, they're still entertaining), but because the way Capote has structured the novel, at least thus far, has been really interesting in terms of how it plays with time, locations and events.

Much like all of Tarantino's films, the structure of In Cold Blood is, to an extent, quite nonlinear. For instance, I can recall at least a couple of scenes that involved the Clutter family, all still among the living, which then used a particular object or person to segue into the future, wherein somebody would be giving police evidence regarding their slaughter. This constant alternation between past, present and future is one that I quite enjoy in all forms of entertainment, particularly when we're thrust into a future where have things seem to have gone very much awry, leaving us to try and fill in the blanks about things reached that point.

Speaking of filling in the blanks, I quite like how Capote hasn't immediately revealed the events of the murders, but rather, has to some extent put us in the minds of the townspeople who are trying to comprehend what, why and how this all happened. The only difference of course is that we're well aware of who's behind the killings. Once again the novel is reminiscent of Tarantino's work (or should that be, Tarantino's work is reminiscent of this novel?) in that with his debut film, Reservoir Dogs, Tarantino told the story of a jewelry heist gone very, very, very wrong, without ever showing the events of the heist itself, in effect allowing the mystery to unfold for the film's audience as it does for the film's characters.

But anyway, getting back to Capote. To reiterate, I feel that playing with structure in this way is an excellent literary technique, one that I can see myself using in my own writing, should the an appropriate enough opportunity arise with its subject matter.

To an extent, that's exactly what I'm doing here, because to finish up this post I'm going back to the very beginning of it, discussing the line that comprises its title. The whole sentence goes:

"Nevertheless, Perry observed with some misgiving the symptoms of fury rearranging Dick's expression: jaw, lips, the whole face slackened; saliva bubbles appeared at the corner of his mouth."

Such a well-written way of saying, "Dick looked pissed off."

To me, this single sentence epitomises a lot of what literary journalism is about and the added freedom of wordplay it offers the author. Were this just a straight down the line news article, there's no doubt the editor would slash that entire sentence, citing excessive verbosity. News journalism is all about keeping it short, sharp and punchy, whereas with literary journalism we're not only given the opportunity to be more creative with words, but in most cases, we're encouraged to be.