I first read Carson McCullers's The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (1940) for class. I cannot trace when in my notes so perhaps it was as an undergrad. I have always carried with me a fondness for the book, remembering it as both emotional and literarily interesting. Yes, it is an emotional book, mostly in the latter half as reality comes calling on the cast of characters, but it is not as literary as I remembered it. Though, this is yet an excellently written novel, written when McCullers was but twenty-three.
The book tells the story of four persons in a moderately sized, southern town during a year right before WWII: an all-night restaurant owner, a black doctor, a Communist dwarf, and Mick, a twelve year old girl, who most would consider the main character. Time is shared with each chapter focusing on one of the four, or on the one man who links them all, Mr. Singer, a deaf-mute with a private life no one knows about who lives in the upstairs room in Mick's family's boarding house, and who becomes something of a father confessor to all four. It is a story that is equally the story of people living their lives each in their own situation, but it is also a story about people in general: the Negro race, through the eyes of Doctor Copeland, the oppressed poor, through the eyes of Mr. Blount, the dwarf, and life on the border of poverty, through the eyes of Mick. Indeed, with Blount and Copeland, long passages are devoted to their political/social beliefs: passages that are not preaching to the reader but are both commentary on the world and development of character — something seen quite clearly when Blount and Copeland meet up, and find they cannot get their own beliefs to meld.
A charting of the book might speak of the deterioration of lives of the four people and those around them, but the book is not wholly bleak. Though readers after the fact cannot but add to the story the facts of the narratively looming war. In truth, most characters end on positive notes, even, as I said, if reality, the dark truth of socio-economic reality, is staring them in the face.
I think the book forces a comparison to Richard Wright's Native Son, published in the same year. Native Son is a well known book, particularly for its socio-political content, but is not a terribly well written book, literarily speaking. Particularly, the central and key elements are forced, and the conclusions we are supposed to take from that sitution contrived. The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter suffers no such ailment, and offers better vision, and critique, of the society of the South of the time — and through that, of the U.S. — than Native Son does of Chicago. If I were to teach Native Son, I would teach it mostly as an attempt at propaganda. If I were to teach Heart, I would teach how it asks questions of the reader and gets the reader to asks those same questions, even when the answers to those questions might not cleanly come together as one. It is a far better book. One may speak of a book having value as literature, and one may speak of a book having value as socio-historical commentary. On the literary side one might point to such as McCullers's use of sudden shifts in scene: between paragraphs the story can advance both in time and space without ever a hiccup felt by the reader. But in that world, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter is at best a very well crafted novel. Its real claim to fame is as a very well crafted novel of socio-historical importance. Which is not to say that Heart is not first and foremost the story about a deaf-mute and the four people for whome he is most dear.
I caught glimpse of the adverts for the coming final seasons of This Is Us while reading it — how could I not, it is being advertised to death — and gave thought of how there was more social and moral value to Heart than in a month's worth a U.S. prime time television. There are reasons you should be reading books like this.
In 2011 McCullers's books were re-released in centenary editions. The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter is also worthily part of the Modern Library series, which is the edition I read.
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