The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter by
Carson McCullers
My rating:
4 of 5 stars
I have no idea how or why this book came across my radar, but that's how books are sometimes. A glance or browsing, something peaks your interest. It gets on my to read list someday. Well this past week was the someday for this book.
It felt like a long, short book. Well it isn't very short, 358 pages in my copy, but it isn't a 600 page beast either. The book is written in a slow languid way. It takes place in the South so the slow pace is appropriate. The book came out just before WWII and there are pieces of that stewing, the stirrings of war. There are several things that surprise me about this book and one is the timeliness for when it was written and how much awareness of what was going outside this town that's the setting of the book.
All of the main characters are longing, lonely and have some restlessness about them. The first we meet is John Singer a deaf mute who desperately misses his fellow friend Antonapoulos. They used to live together, do everything together except work, until Antonapoulos went a little crazy and his relative had him committed, taken away. Since then Singer has been bereft and pines until he can go visit him on a short vacation.
There are four other main characters and they all go to Singer to talk and find something in him they cannot find in anyone else. They find Singer peaceful and so understanding, and all without knowing what Singer himself feels. There is a young teenage tom-boy girl Mick Kelley who is one of a large family that runs the boarding house where Singer now lives. Mick has music inside her so much it hurts. There is Jack Blount who is a drunk and communist, or close enough, who wants everyone to know about how the system is, how there shouldn't be the rich businesses taking all while the people go poor and hungry.
Another man who visits Singer is Biff Brannon, the owner of the New York Café. He reads and organizes the newspapers very carefully, and never throws one away. He is a hoarder on this aspect. He doesn't talk as much as the other three with Singer as he's more of an observer and tries to figure things out. When talking to Blount he will ask questions of him, such as why and what would you do. The other man who regularly visits Singer is a black doctor, Benedict Mady Copeland. He is the father of Portia who is the cook at the Kelley boarder house. He has four children and he had such ambitions for them once they were born but they went along with their mother and religion. Doctor Copeland has always had a "strong true purpose" and he tried to impart that on his children, and his race, but could never seem to succeed.
The struggles these characters go through are what sets them apart from everyone else. Even Blount and Doctor Copeland end up talking and realizing they want the same thing, but then how to succeed at getting people to the same place they differ and end up arguing. Interestingly Doctor Copeland has this idea that years years later Dr. Martin Luther King organizes and does, the March on Washington. How did this writer come up with this? Another place that amazed and surprised me.
The book is thick with characters and ideals, longings, but not much on plot. Perhaps there's a little one, but the book doesn't linger there. There were a few moments when I thought it was going on too long and I had to push on. It's worth reading, but it isn't a joyful experience, and parts are so painful. It's an incredible book. It's a good one to read and discuss with others, even now going on 80 years later.
Radio Free Vermont: A Fable of Resistance by Bill McKibben
