The Member of the Wedding

Having read The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter a few years ago, I was eager to crack open another Carson McCullers' book. If I could find half of the raw emotion and character that enveloped McCullers' first novel, I would be content. I chose The Member of the Wedding for no reason other than accessibility; I happened to have a copy right in front of me. Though the book started out much too slow, lacked a good sense of pacing, and wasn't nearly as powerful as its predecessor, it was a great novel, indeed.

McCullers had this way of picking out the most awkward, socially-inept characters and making them accessible to her readers. Not only are these characters accessible, but their actions and feelings really resonate with many of us, I believe. Frankie Addams (or F. Jasmine as she prefers to be called) is one of these characters. She's strange and unsophisticated, but she believes otherwise, which leads her along a path toward great embarrassment or worse. The reader sees it coming, and because we care about the character we want her to avoid it, but because this is a McCullers story we eagerly anticipate the destruction. We know the carnage will be laid out in a way that is moving and lyrical.

In some ways The Member of the Wedding is on par with The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter —it is a wonderful character study and does not flinch in its portrayal of the human condition. In other regards, however, The Member of the Wedding doesn't have the story or the cast of secondary characters that made McCullers' debut novel unstoppable. Regardless, I look forward to the next. McCullers' name easily belongs amongst the greats of her time.

I really enjoyed this book. The main character reminded me a bit of Holden Caulfield or Scout Finch - just a unique and true voice.

Frankie provides our eyes and ears for A Member of the Wedding and what a view she gives us readers! Frankie is poised on the edge of childhood and adulthood, that awful spot we now call adolescence, but she is not sitting quietly on the edge; she is teetering back and forth between the worlds and it is not a happy place to be. She has lost her connections to her world. There are only two who try to call her back into the world: Berenice, the housekeeper, and her cousin, John Henry. As Frankie questions the world, Berenice is the voice of the grownup world, trying to ease Frankie into the new world. At the same time, John Henry is the voice of Frankie's childhood, urging her to play, to experience the world, to forget the world of thinking. Frankie's one hope becomes her desire to escape and join her brother and his new wife after their wedding. Of course, this does not happen and Frankie goes back to her world, but she is not the same person she once was.

What a rich, marvelous book! I could read it all over again and I think I would love it just as much. Frankie's encounter with the soldier...the monkey and the monkey owner...the Freaks....the noises and the pictures the author draws of this world...a rich, rich story.