Steve's Reviews > The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter

By the time Mozart was 5, he was composing his own music and performing for royalty. John Stuart Mill had mastered Latin, Greek, Algebra and Euclidean Geometry by the time he was 8. Bobby Fischer won the US Chess Championship at the age of 14. When Orson Welles was 20, he directed his own adaptation of Macbeth as a WPA project with unemployed black performers in Harlem. Why I myself, if you’ll forgive me for crowing, memorized the batting averages of every member of the Cincinnati Reds’ starting lineup as a 12-year-old. So is it really all that impressive that Carson McCullers wrote this top 100 book* at the ripe old age of 23?! (Sorry, my humor never matured much beyond the days of Reds’ glory.)

I have to confess that it was almost a distraction to read this knowing how young McCullers was to have written something so insightful, polished and world-weary. She managed to get deep inside the heads of five very different characters in a mill town in Georgia just prior to WWII and give voice to their many valid concerns. In the case of John Singer, the voice was purely an inner one. He was a deaf mute. In a way, he was the central island in the archipelago to which the others hoped to connect. Singer was a good listener (reading lips) and had understanding eyes, but there was a bit of Chauncey Gardiner about him, too, in that people assumed more of a Christ-like, simpatico alliance than was possible from their confidant. They didn’t realize how sad and lonely he was himself when his only friend, another deaf man, had been sent to the asylum. Singer’s hands (used for signing) became silent.

Among the other characters, the adolescent tomboy, Mick Kelly, was most prominent. She’s said to be a semiautobiographical construct, which is easy to believe given her lanky appearance, her artistic sensitivity, and her advanced intellect. To me, she was a more human (read flawed, troubled and nuanced) version of Harper Lee’s Scout. She was written so powerfully – it was easy to ache alongside her as she craved more music (her big love in life) and peace of mind (that family circumstances would not allow).

Doctor Copeland was another memorable character. As a highly educated black physician, he had few peers, but he had a vision for lifting his people and combating racial injustice. The lack of progress was brought home convincingly as McCullers did an excellent job personalizing it through him and his family. She was evidently ahead of her time, casting a critical, clear-sighted eye on the relations of the day.

The two other POV characters were Jake Blount, a hard-drinking carnie mechanic with a Marxist bent, and Biff Brannon, a café/bar owner with a generous, aesthetic spirit struggling against alienation. They, too, bared their souls to John Singer as a part of an empathetic hub and spoke model.

We get to know a handful of other characters, too, valuable for advancing the plot and populating the communal landscape. The Jewish boy growing up with Mick who fears the news out of Europe, Dr. Copeland’s son who finds himself on the wrong (black) side of the (white) law, Mick’s little brother George whose impulsive actions led to dramatic changes (most profoundly in himself) – they all had important parts to play.

Things happen in this book, but I wouldn’t call it plot-driven. It’s mostly profiles of the people and reactions to the times. There was precious little cheer to go around. Faced with that fact, McCullers never did flinch. As one of the chaps in Spinal Tap once said, standing at Elvis’s grave, it was almost “too much bloody perspective.” Sugar must have been scarce in the Depression-era South – scant amounts to coat the world that she saw. But there seemed to be hope for sweeter days ahead. Even if I’m wrong about those hopes, this is an important and authentically observed book, well worth the time.

*In 1998, the Modern Library ranked The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter seventeenth on its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century. Time magazine included the novel in its TIME 100 Best English-language Novels from 1923 to 2005. (Copied from Wikipedia)