Such Good Friends is highly readable. Truman Capote is the beating heart of this novel. As the decades roll on, it has become increasingly apparent—and ironic, after all the newsprint and media noise about Norman Mailer, Philip Roth, John Updike, Eugene O’Neill, and Arthur Miller—that midcentury American literature belongs to three gay men: W. H. Auden, Tennessee Williams, and Truman Capote.