[While the stories in A Tree of Night and Other Stories are] extremely well-written they are a slippery witchery collection. The usual theme seems to be pursuit—and escape. People are brought face to face and often overwhelmed by the unacknowledged desire and/or fear. When done well this is always an interesting theme. Capote matches logic with the perversely illogical. But his ideas are enshrined in technical fluency, tricks of impressionism and the like, and this makes it difficult to judge at first whether they are utter nonsense, ash from a psychoanalytic binge, or whether they should be taken seriously. The only argument for the latter it seems to me is that Capote takes his subjects to an undefinable area of the soul where usual standards are hard to apply. If this area exists any author who can exploit it has hit a goldmine where he cannot...