Lonesome Literature

When the title of a book has the word "lonely" in it, remind me to pay attention in the future.

I finished Carson McCuller's The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter a few weeks ago. I bought it at The Dusty Bookshelf because I liked the cover and because I was in the mood to read a serious novel and because I wanted to read something set in the South. It's winter, goshdarnit, and I want to dream of hazy humidity and mossy trees and thick brambles of green.

I don't regret reading the book--in fact, I thought it was one of the best novels I've ever read--but this really wasn't the best time of year to read it. It's a book whose topic is loneliness. The novel follows John Singer, a deaf mute living in a small Southern town in the late 1930s. His best friend, another deaf mute, has been sent to a mental institution many miles away and, for the first time in his ten years of adulthood, no one can "hear" him speak.

As he copes with this loss, Singer moves into a new boarding house and begins to be visited by strangers who feel compelled to talk to him: Dr. Copeland, a black doctor who reads Marx and Spinoza and is desperately, painfully committed to helping his people escape oppression; Jake Blount, a half-mad alcoholic anarchist and labor activist; Biff Brannon, a cafe owner and recent widower who wants to understand Singer and the people who follow him; and Mick Kelly, the 14-year-old girl who dreams of moving to the snowy north and becoming a musician and who has Mozart's symphonies playing constantly in her head.

All of these characters, particularly Dr. Copeland, Jake, and Mick, and burning with a passion that no one else in the town is able to access or understand. And all of them, the quiet Biff and Singer included, are hounded by loneliness, the desire to be heard and to be understood. Singer follows his mad friend, aching to use his hands to speak directly to someone who understands him. Dr. Copeland and Jake and Mick chase Singer, feeling paradoxically that the lip reader is the only man on earth who understands them. Biff watches them all out of the new emptiness his wife's death has created, wondering what all this loneliness means in the world.

Despite the characters' passions and yearnings and hungers, it's a novel where very little happens. Usually, I dislike plotless novels, but McCuller's characters are so brilliantly drawn, so lifelike and complex and beautiful and sad, that I was rapidly pulled through the 300+ pages of the novel by pure curiosity. I desperately wanted to see these characters' lives become better because I understood their motives in the same way that I understand my own. McCuller's creates true empathy in this novel, and she does so brilliantly.

Mick Kelly especially comes to life. She made me remember being 14, feeling constantly confused and over-excited and angry and hungry and passionate for art--books in my case, music in Mick's. I get the impression that McCullers (who was only 23 when she wrote the novel) modeled the character after her own childhood and, I presume, her own desire to be a writer.

The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter is a novel I would recommend to anyone, but not in November or December. It's the kind of heavy reading that's best reserved for the summer months, when there's sunshine and plenty to do and the world feels all fat and lazy and happy and slow. One needs the summer to counteract messages like "deep and soul-wrenching loneliness is intrinsic to human life and is its greatest and most painful motivator." Ack! The winter is just too cold for novels like this.

I thought I learned that lesson a few years ago when I read Ethan Frome and Jude the Obscure, two of the saddest novels ever written in America, in the same week in December. No, thank you! This time, the lesson's going to stick! It's only The Golden Compass and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and Tamora Pierce from here until March, people! Loneliness is an excellent topic for excellent novels, but a terrible topic for mid-winter ruminations.