The beginning of Rabbit, Run was very slow and it took a long time for me to get into the story. (The first chapter was 135 pages long.) I think part of the reason is because it is written in a sort of monotone voice with no feeling. It was as if Updike was conveying Harry's feelings of hopelessness to the reader through the way it was written. He did the same thing with confusion, by writing those long confusing run-on sentences that seemed to have no meaning, with no beginning and no end. When Harry became somewhat happy with Ruth, the tone of the book picked up too. You could almost feel Harry wanting to skip down the sidewalk. He also used it to put us inside Janice's head while she was drunk, by imposing the drunken, scattered thoughts that she was having while trying to prepare for her mother's arrival. The more I think about it, it is actually a pretty clever way of imposing meaning upon the reader in a way other than just through the written words.
In Cold Blood had almost a sing-song tone-the same as Capote's spoken voice. I think he used that tone at times to make the reader have a "child-like" image of Perry, which would make it easier for Capote to convince the audience that Perry may not have been such a bad guy. He also used "real-life" letters and other evidence that would help us understand why Perry behaved the way he did. If it was "real-life", then it must be true, and we would have to believe it. He never gave us that much information or explanation about Hickock. Capote meant for us to pity Perry-he didn't care what we thought of Dick.
In the end, I felt sorry for Perry; felt sorry for Dick; felt sorry for Ruth; felt sorry for Eccles; and changed back and forth from feeling sorry for Harry and Janice to despising them both.