This is a very well written but very sad book. Carson McCullers was 23 years old when she published this, which fact when taken into account makes this a great book. To be so young with such insight to the way the world works and the way people are is pretty amazing.
It is set in a small Southern town sometime in the late 1930’s. The cast of characters here are about as far away from the rich, upper class characters inhabiting many of the books on this list that you can possibly get. This book reminded me a lot of Thomas Wolfe’s Look Homeward, Angel. It is about that sense of loneliness we all have as human beings.
The main players are Mick Kelly, a 13 year old girl who loves music and dreams of doing great things with it; Jake Blount, a drifter who would like to change the world but has no idea how to go about it; Dr. Copeland, a Negro physician who understands all too well his appointed “place” he is to maintain despite his intellect and heart; and Biff Brannon, the local café owner who is either something of a pervert or a man trapped in his gender role with a preference for female things – I never quite decided what his sense of isolation stemmed from exactly. These characters all swirl around John Singer, a deaf-mute who is the epitome of loneliness and isolation due to his inability, or more accurately his ambivelance, to communicate with anyone around him. Despite Singer’s indifference all these other characters are constantly seeking his company to tell him all the things that there is no point telling anyone else. This is the crux of what makes this such a sad story, the only outlet the characters have for expressing themselves is akin to pouring their hearts out to a wall. Yet they all feel Singer somehow “gets” them or understands their deepest thoughts and feelings. Singer however is trapped in his own world by his handicap (and his choice) and cares about nothing but his deaf-mute friend who is institutionalized early in the story.
Sad, sad, sad, is about all I can say of all this. Lots of little things happen and McCullers is an excellent writer. Mick has taken a free government art class and these are the pictures she draws “…one with an airplane crashing down and people jumping out to save themselves, and another with a trans-Atlantic liner going down and all the people trying to push and crowd into one little lifeboat….She had imagined a fire on Broad Street…Another pictures was called ‘Boiler Busts in Factory,’ and men were jumping out of windows…” Et cetera, Et cetera!
Dr. Copeland’s daughter, Portia, works for the Kelly family. She tells Mick her problem is about not having love in her life, and essentially that is what everyone is searching for everywhere, not just in this book. “But you haven’t never loved God nor even nair a person. You hard and tough as cowhide. But just the same I knows you. This afternoon you going to roam all over the place without never being satisfied. You going to traipse all around likes you have to find something lost. You going to work yourself up with excitement. Your heart going to beat hard enough to kill you because you don’t love and don’t have peace. And then someday you going to bust lose and be ruined. Won’t nothing help you then.” That pretty much sums it up for everyone in this book.
Jake makes this observation one night to Singer “A fellow can’t live without giving his passive acceptance to meanness.” While that rings very true, one should at least be forced to look at it now and again to remember we are all people. With all the hatefulness and fearmongering going on currently to try to divide us into “this” kind and “that” kind this book ought to be a reminder to people that the only “kind” we have to stick to is really the same kind. I thought this was a great book and if you have the nerve, you should give it a try.
Next week: Ernie takes on Sister Carrie by Theodore Dreiser
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