by Carson McCullers
1940 (reprinted 1993) • The Modern Library
430 pages / 0679424741 (hardcover)
The Village of Nyack sits on the Hudson River in southern New York State with a population of 6,700. A shipbuilding and manufacturing center in past eras, it is nowadays a middle class residential area dotted by the recent presence of figures like actress Helen Hayes and painter Edward Hopper. This was also the chosen home of Carson McCullers, who worked closely with Hayes on the stage, and would become the endpoint of her turbulent journey that began in Georgia fifty years earlier.
It’s obvious that The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter stands as a magnificent achievement by a young author, with McCullers’s debut novel ranked 17th on the Modern Library list of 100 best novels in English. Yet the fact that McCullers published the novel at 23 (Dickens, by comparison, began publishing sections of The Pickwick Papers when he’d just turned 24) tends to cloud Heart’s place in the literary canon as a great work regardless of age. When compared to any American author at any point in his or her career – Hawthorne, Melville, Wharton, Cather, Tarkington, Updike – McCullers’s work in Heart easily holds sway with that of her colleagues.
The first test for a novel to be considered ‘great’ is its ability to rise above era and location, becoming a thing of universal significance. Heart could’ve easily restricted itself in meaning to the American South but, like Faulkner and O’Connor’s novels, it became far more. While it addresses the social predicaments of the South during the late 1930s, Heart encompasses all people with a theme that afflicts millions: the desire to fit in. Even in these days of political correctness and multiculturalism, huge shares of the human race do not enjoy inclusion and the social divides, caused through history and its continued prejudices, seem unable to be bridged.What makes Heart special is the lingering emptiness and prevalent sense (for Whites) of shame that we feel after reading. All of the novel’s characters are vividly drawn and cannot be easily forgotten. McCullers, even in her characters' most debased hours, avoids cheap pity and instead uses a simple, non-emotive narrative that forces readers to look at themselves and produce their own judgments. McCullers is so restrained in her telling of the story that we have to find the sympathy in our own bodies, something that only the most coldhearted person could fail to do.
There is very little to say about McCullers’s prose style, which in Heart is only blemished on rare occasions by repetition: constant reference to the sky’s color becomes grating and ‘that were never said before,’ in speaking of the mute John Singer and his friends, really does not add to the dramatic effect – it just looks a bit overwrought. Her syntax flows easily; there is not a poorly-placed word to really be found and McCullers is excellent in conveying Southern life by using habits and speech in select places rather than bogging the story down with it. At 23, her writing already has distinction and is almost completely free of doubt and experimentation.
First-time readers of McCullers might ask questions in the opening 114 pages (part I of III) about where this novel is going, since it’s written in the older mode of introducing characters before moving forward the plot. All doubt should be dispelled, however, when the extensive middle section kicks in and we begin to experience the day-to-day trials that make Southern Whites and Blacks alike unable to reach a higher sphere of existence. There is something of us in each character that McCullers enlivens; Mick Kelly’s pains as a burgeoning teenager will hold particular resonance for women, just as Benedict Copeland, an overworked and idealistic doctor, should carry impact in the Black community. Above all, Heart is a novel that appeals to many people for many things, a fact that will assure its survival.
The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter is available from several publishers, including the Modern Library in an attractive hardcover edition from 1993. The ML edition is in familiarly clean and easy-to-read type and has a short bio on McCullers. Other labels include Mariner, Bantam Press, and the first edition run by Houghton Mifflin.
