14: Book Review 3, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter

Carson McCullers captures the emotional human turmoil of feeling utterly alone in mind and soul in a way that's so honest, pure, and universal as to upend itself in loving awareness. The novel vignettes various perspectives of a 1930s southern mill town: a young poor white girl who loves music, a deaf mute man without family, a misunderstood Marxist drunk, a compassionate and lonely bar owner, and an old tired Black doctor fighting for civil rights. All of these characters’ lives intertwine in a shared struggle of righteous causes, continually downtrodden by a painful, broken America. 

Mr. Singer, the deaf mute man they all come to for solace, unknowingly serves almost as a christ-like figure as his visitors and confidantes project onto him whichever identity serves them in their otherwise lonely or misunderstood lives. It is no coincidence that a deaf and mute man is incidentally a point of gravity for all of them, as he is a listening ear, a door to a solution, a living journal for them to pour into in their disharmony from society. He presents no backlash, no rebuttal, no articulated agreement or points, no judgment emanates from him. His silence is assumed as wisdom. His eyes met with perfect dignity and safety in assumption. He serves them all, without even trying, through his silence, and he is happy to do so, for he is lonely too.

“During the moonlit January nights Singer continued to walk about the streets of the town each evening when he was not engaged. The rumors about him grew bolder. An old Negro woman told hundreds of people that he knew the ways of spirits come back from the dead.[...] The rich thought that he was rich and the poor considered him a poor man like themselves. And as there was no way to disprove these rumors they grew marvelous and very real. Each man described the mute as he wished him to be.”(223)

The central theme falls into our tendency to believe we are alone, when we are anything but. When we fail to find community, support for our rights, beliefs, or longings, we look around and think, “does nobody see what I see? Does anybody feel the way I feel?”. McCullers zooms out and affirms to us that yes, yes they do. It is almost as if silent witnessing reveals this, if only we slow down enough to see.

A still frame from the 1968 film adaptation of the novel by Robert Ellis Miller.

I wrote a poem two years ago that also evokes the feeling of grieving for connection. 

And so there was nobody, 

he decided.

Then he stood up,

and with the soft thud of tiny

echoless boot steps,

he floated to the back door in weightless movement

Determined to feel as insubstantial as a gray puff of dust,

a drifting lint searching for the dim.

And all of the nobody watched him

pretend to be alone

knowing he was anything but it.

This story pokes at how our ego tells us “nobody understands”, by showcasing all of the ways in which they do, and how we simply don’t have the layers of discernment necessary to peel back the veil.

McCullers contends with capitalism and its resulting poverty, with racism and its seemingly infinite injustices, with gender and its expectations, with disability and its invisibility, with age and its woes--coming and going. She does this all in a way that’s so realistic that it aches. 

“For in a swift radiance of illumination he saw a glimpse of human struggle and of valor. Of the endless fluid passage of humanity through endless time. And of those who labor and of those who--one word--love. His soul expanded. But for a moment only. For in him he felt a warning, a shaft of terror. Between the two worlds he was suspended.[...]And he was suspended between radiance and darkness. Between bitter irony and faith.”(358-9)

 You know that scene in the Shawshank Redemption film when Brooks (the librarian) finally gets out of prison and is utterly alone in the world with nothing tying him anywhere and nobody left to love him? And when he ends his life because the world has passed him by and he has nothing to live for anymore? That's the feeling this book creates. That is the void it opens up. The dejected feeling when someone gets excited about something and it fails or dressed up and the event gets canceled. Or when a kid isn't invited to a classmate's birthday party. Or when you see a feeble old person alone on a bench knowing they have nobody left and the life they built is falling away.

This book captures that feeling so purely, and then coaxes out your shreds of hope, assembles them with justice into a pictured future of togetherness, and walks you home.

I rated this book 5/5 stars on Goodreads, follow me there so we can share our reading updates and aspirations together (@groovygab).

Thank you for reading, as always.