Collection of Short Fiction: Music for Chameleons

Overview
Truman Capote’s Music for Chameleons gathers a late-career suite of pieces that drift between story, reportage, and portrait, showcasing a writer who treats voice as instrumentation. Published in 1980 after years of silence and false starts, the collection feels like a cabinet of curiosities: tales of elegant strangeness, a true-crime dossier that refuses neat closure, and intimate conversations with the famous and the ordinary. The title hints at the book’s method, art as a tuning fork that coaxes hidden colors from people and places.

Structure
The book is arranged in three movements. The opening section offers short fictions and miniatures in Capote’s crystalline, mischievous style. The centerpiece is a novella-length nonfiction account of an American murder investigation, "Handcarved Coffins", that extends the documentary techniques Capote refined in In Cold Blood into something more elastic and self-reflexive. The final section, “Conversational Portraits,” presents talk as theater: stylized encounters, often with Capote as an audible participant, where personality reveals itself in the turns of a sentence, a hesitation, a joke.

Highlights
In the title story, on a verandah in Martinique, an aging grande dame plays classical records for a gathering of chameleons that change colors with the music. The scene, delicate and faintly absurd, blooms into a meditation on loneliness, colonial residue, and the alchemy by which attention transforms the world. Elsewhere, a sliver of desert life becomes a parable of disillusion; a day spent alongside domestic workers turns into an x-ray of urban intimacy and danger; a New York window becomes a lantern that throws shifting silhouettes of memory across the night.

"Handcarved Coffins" follows a western lawman obsessed with a string of murders linked by ominous miniatures mailed in advance to the victims. Capote appears as himself, note-taker, diner companion, uneasy confidant, as the detective replays scenes of snakes sealed inside a car, a couple decapitated by an invisible trap, adversaries bound by land and water rights. Names, dates, interviews, and sketches pile up, yet the case resists courtroom resolution. The suspense never snaps; it hums, a study not only of a killer’s ingenuity but of American impunity, the ways power erases footprints even as it leaves scars.

Among the conversational portraits, a meeting with Marilyn Monroe, wry, frightened, unguardedly shrewd, renders a star as a woman alert to the cost of her radiance. “Ghosts in Sunlight: A Hollywood Entertainment” plays like a mirrored funhouse of moguls, money, and make-believe, where studio rooms feel haunted by the deals struck inside them. Throughout, Capote’s own presence is frank and theatrical; he is a participant-observer who understands that how people speak is often what they are.

Themes and Tone
Music for Chameleons is preoccupied with performance, of class, of celebrity, of menace, and with the moral fog that performance creates. It probes the bright surface of American glamour to expose the bruises underneath, and it invests equally in the textures of ordinary lives. Capote’s tone alternates between diamond-edged elegance and streetwise candor, with dialogue sharpened to a point and imagery that glints rather than gushes. Fact and fiction braid together, not to deceive, but to reach an emotional truth that bare transcription cannot.

Legacy
The collection stands as Capote’s last fully realized book, an agile summation of his gifts: a miniaturist’s eye, a reporter’s ear, and a dramatist’s instinct for scene. Its hybrid forms anticipate the porous borders of contemporary narrative nonfiction and autofiction, while its portraits, of killers, icons, and bystanders, linger like songs that change color when the light shifts.