The Heart is a Lonely Hunter

A rather strange, and yet, enjoyable read. It is still spinning around in my mind, although I finished it earlier this afternoon.

Somehow, I had missed Ms. McCullers' works, although I've enjoyed other Southern gothic authors like William Faulkner, Tennessee Williams, Harper Lee, Truman Capote, Eudora Welty, and the great Flannery O'Connor. Ms. McCullers comes relatively early in the 20th Century Southern gothic arch and seems to have been influenced by the realists like Hemingway, although I didn't find any support for that idea. Her prose is clean and deftly twists and turns the slang and syntax of different inhabitants of the novel's small mill town so you can practically hear the rich drawls.

She preferred to compare her work to the earlier Russians like Chekhov and Tolstoy, as opposed to being lumped into the Southern gothic melange. While there are some similarities to the Russians, like writing about poor people struggling against themselves, I do feel that her novel has the languid, Spanish moss sense of time and many of the characters are oddballs and outcasts that set it firmly into Southern gothic camp.

The five main characters of the novel are all lonely outcasts hunting for meaning, acceptance, and love, but are constrained by their own inability to decompartmentalize different parts of their lives and to properly communicate. In fact, all five characters worshipfully communicate with their chosen “deity” (for John Singer, Antonapoulas and for Mick Kelly, Dr. Copeland, Biff Brannon, and Jake Blount; John Singer), but never achieve or really seem to want a two-way street. In fact, all of the worshipers are delusional about their god and think that there's magic to just talking to that person.

And that ends up being each character's tragedy. John Singer and Antonapoulas may have had a homosexual relationship, although it is not clearly stated; it would provide an additional explanation for Antonapoulas' cousin committing him to a mental institution beyond increasingly erratic behaviors. Once Antonapoulas dies, Singer can no longer maintain his placid existence and bi-annual vacations to visit Antonapoulas, and ends up committing suicide. Jake Blount finds himself unable to control his violent impulses and flees town after killing a young black man when a fight breaks out at the carnival; he's not quite able to reconcile his wish for the proletariat to rise up and the demons of alcohol addiction. Biff Brannon is able to re-emerge a little after his wife's death and interestingly plays with expected gender roles, which would certainly have been a big deal in the South of the 1940s. Dr. Copeland is unable to achieve dreams that wouldn't be realized until the Civil Rights movement a quarter of a century later; at the same time, he carries a dark , violent side that occasionally leaks out, which turned both is wife and children against him. Only Mick Kelly really seems to have possibilities at the end of the novel, perhaps because she is a biographical nod to the author, who did go on to study piano. I love the chapters told from Mick's tomboy point of view as she travels over various potholes towards young adulthood. Although she's consigned to flames of department store clerkdom woe at the end of the novel, the reader is given the impression that she might find a way to access her “inner room” and reconnect with her love of music.

After each character loses their deity, they end up somewhat, if not a great deal, worse off than they were at the beginning of the story. I'm not sure whether she intended that a search for God in other humans is ultimately fruitless because each person is estranged, or whether she was disillusioned with the God.