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.
