The fellow was downright uncanny. People felt themselves watching him even before they knew that there was anything different about him. His eyes made a person think that he heard things nobody else had ever heard, that he knew things no one had ever guessed before. He did not seem quite human.
- The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers
I've been way, way behind in my reading over the past few months. Life has been a bit of a whirlwind - new job, new place, new pretty much everything in life. Reading fell a bit by the wayside but now that I'm all unpacked (well, mostly) I'm eyeing my unread stacks of books again.
I actually read this book, Carson McCullers' The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, for my book group while all the craziness was unfolding, but I wasn't sure quite what I wanted to say about it, or how I felt it as a story or a classic work of literature. I chose this book for our book group to read because it had been on my shelf waiting to be read for some time, but I knew nearly nothing about it other than that it was considered a classic.
This novel is set around a distinctive collection of characters, set in the 1930s in the south, but the central one is John Singer, who is a deaf mute. When the story begins he lives happily with his friend, Spiros Antonapoulos, also a mute. Life seems fine, until his friend's personality changes and he starts stealing minor items and causing trouble. Antonapoulos is then sent away by his cousin to a facility, and Singer is left alone and bereft in this town where he has no other friends or family.
Singer takes to spending his evenings at the local 24 hour tavern, where our motley crew interacts. The tavern is run by Biff, who is listless and unhappy, but still going through the motions, along with his wife Alice. Biff has taken an interest in Jake Blout, a vagabond with vague communist leanings who came into town and has been drinking, eating, and sleeping at the tavern, without much ability to pay for it all. Blout is an odd gentleman, prone to drunken ranting at whoever happens to be around. One evening, Blout begins talking to Singer, not realizing for some time that Singer is not speaking to him in return. Blout is fascinated by Singer, becoming convinced that he is the only person that really can understand him.
Singer has this effect on people, becoming the sounding board for everyone from Mick, a teenage girl who wants nothing more than to be a musician but who is too poor to afford an instrument, to Doctor Copeland, the highly educated black doctor who believes his mission in life is to share his idea of the great work with his community. We follow these characters as they experience misfortunes and their lives deviate from what they believe they want them to be. It's a downward spiral for everyone involved as they slowly succumb to the inevitable, including our central character, Singer, who wants nothing more than to visit his good friend Antonapoulos and have back a small bit of the happiness they once had.
This book is a bit of a bummer. I suppose I should have inferred that from the cover, with the author looking lachrymose in a field. I wanted someone - even just one - of the characters we come to care for to have a minor victory, escape the snares of everyday banality and the sadness of what could have been. Maybe its the inescapable realism of this book that refuses to give us that - to give us that fiction of a happy ending. Our characters struggle against racism, poverty, a community that does not care about their radical ideas, but in the south of the 30's they cannot win, no matter how much we want them to. And maybe that's more revolutionary than the false hope of a character that triumphs above all odds.
