The Heart is a Lonely Hunter

A few weeks ago I re-read a novel - The Heart is a Lonely Hunter - that I had plucked from the bookshelves of a friend's flat I was staying in during a few days in Munich. I began reading it in Bavaria and finished reading it in England having inadvertently taken the book back with me in my backpack. It was a long, tight read. I read it slowly because it's a book rich in minute details and overlapping small-town story-lines that made me think of William Faulkner and especially Faulkner's book Sanctuary.

It's a book hard to summarise easily. When I was reading it, I wrote notes and had plans for an essay (I did make some notes on white cards) but now, several weeks later, I can't think of any overall standout theme. The author, Carson McCullers, is like a documentary-maker getting to the heart and soul of a small, southern town in the US. Her camera goes in close, uncomfortably close, to a populace of misfits and the damned.

The examination of the characters' lives is unremitting. The taut prose gleams boldly and is heroically unforgiving of its subjects, precise and cutting like a surgeon's knife; the narrative is film-like, the scenes like minimalist paintings, the honesty of the emotions pared back to a raw richness, until the burst of defiant expression. The characters are so hard on themselves. The heart is a ruthless hunter, maybe.

And yet, out of the bleakness, there is a progressive reach, truth is somehow nearby, and the lowest of the low are ennobled by their immense struggle. I can think of no other novel that, chapter by chapter, could be a contender for a cut and paste treatment. You can read these chapters any which way and still feel the pull of the book's power.

I have to post this yellowing spine-broken book back to Munich. It is an easy book to let go of, a hard novel to surface from.

On one of my white cards I wrote:

Benedict Mady Copeland (Dr Copeland)
is a precursor to:

Malcolm X
Martin Luther King
Rev. Jesse Jackson