The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (1940)

I only came to Carson McCullers's first novel about 10 years ago, but have read it several times now. Something about these mundane events in a small Georgia town in the 1930s is mesmerizing and keeps drawing me back. It's extraordinarily beautiful. McCullers started it when she was 20. She was 23 when it was published. Her prodigy is more one of instinct. Her aim is true. Her eye is gentle but telling, circling and unerringly tracking the interior lives of many different people: Mick Kelly, a teenaged girl who dreams of composing music. Jake Blount, an alcoholic Communist true believer. Dr. Copeland, an African American physician who seethes with racial resentment. Biff Brannon, the stoic proprietor of the New York Café, an all-night diner. And John Singer, the deaf-mute silver engraver at the town jewelry store who ties them all together. Each one is plunged into loneliness, hurting for something like soul connections. That's my term, not McCullers's. She is somehow operating on levels beyond language. That's what's most impressive about this novel, even more than how young she was when she wrote it. The most common praise I've seen is for how believable her African American characters are. Richard Wright, who published Native Son the same year, praised them as astonishing. But there are further hints of social tensions here even beyond race and class, flirting with the broader spectrum of sexuality. I sensed them in this novel before finding out more about McCullers's life, which included alcoholism and bisexuality in both she and her husband. The sexuality is mostly on the furthest sidelines of The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, just a humming vibration in the background. As much as anything this novel is focused on poverty, the spiritual kind (see title) but definitely the material kind too. It's the Depression era in the South. It may go to the Jesus story and New Testament somewhat obviously, with a martyr and disciples and so on, though not to drive any point or message, let alone a religious one, but more because it is a comfortable frame, a way to understand—a common language. This is her gospel as a young woman, the gospel according to Carson McCullers. The real common language here is pain. Some terrible things happen in The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, and arguably the whole thing is downbeat or even depressing. Yet its view of human souls is so penetrating and astute, shot clear through, that it is almost breathtaking in places. Not everything rings fresh and true, but the things that do are often best of their kind. For example, the story of Bubber and Baby, their shared moment of fate and its aftermath. All five of the main characters are memorable and true, and so are their stories. It's amazing stuff—after Gatsby, my favorite American novel.

In case it's not at the library. (Library of America)