The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (Oprah's Book Club) | Carson McCullers

The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (Oprah's Book Club) | Carson McCullers | A justly earnt reputation

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The Heart Is a Lon...

	The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (Oprah's Book Club) Carson McCullers Mariner, 2004 - 368 pages average customer review:based on 157 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Astounding for a Twenty-two-Year-Old, Anyone!

Oprah put The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter on her book club list and it's been selling well as a Golden Oldie, but don't be put off by Oprah's middlebrow fans, Carson McCullers was a genius.

At age twenty-two McCullers arrives in New York City with a manuscript so insightful into human pathos, you would think she knew Freud and Aristotle on a first name basis. The book made a sensation from the beginning. Certainly Richard Wright thought that it was the first book by a Southern white person that had any insight and feelings for the plight of Negroes. Indeed, her characterizations of black poor people crashed barriers with ease. Her characterizations of Mick Kelly's family and other white citizens of a mythological Faulknarian hamlet are no less well drawn.

Lonely doesn't have a plot. The reader shares the thoughts and overhears the conversations of five characters, Mick, McCuller's teen alter-ego, Doctor Copeland the only black doctor for a thousand miles raging with hatred for white men and his own race, Mr. Brannon, a caf owner with a suddenly dead wife and a semi-unhealthy obsession about young Mick, Jake Blount a Marxist revolutionary, roustabout, and Singer the deaf mute.

It is Singer that brings these diverse characters together for he is their father confessor, but that's a laugh for the reader; Singer can't hear them. They go on and on about their lives, their dreams and disappointments, but Singer merely nods his head agreeably. The mute becomes a kind of town guru, a Buddha. He has a following of folks that think he has mystical powers or great intellect. In reality, Singer is a nice man, but he loves only one person, and that man is in a mental hospital.

This book is very influential. Southern American writers have some kind of catharsis in youth that's a leg up for a fiction writer. After all, life is surreal enough if you examine a life, any life.

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A justly earnt reputation

Reputations! Some so portenuous that the mere title bristles with their scent. Such is, The heart Is a Lonely Hunter, a killer title that has become an inherited cliche, absorbed into mainstream language.It is timeless and gripping. You can sense kinship with, 'To Kill a Mockingbird', and the more florid Cormac McCarthy's, 'Suttree'. It's realisation of ambivalent, struggling, and confounded people is so complete that some of the social economic reforms, petitioned between the covers, would have to actualise before its impact paled to irrelevance. The pace is unhurried. The weather necessarily imposes itself on the lives of its fistful of characters. And as they saunter and scrape through a year, mostly perplexed and projecting their anxieties on the mute, Singer, (an ironic nomenclature) the plot waxes and wanes for each of them. The injustices of power and wealth distribution are given vent by the most driven, most outsiderish two men, who find peace and consolation in the company of the mute. Their political and spiritual impotence at first pulls them close, then segregates them, ideologically and racially. The random violence that so rudely grooves their destinies is casually evoked: dramas to be sure, but absorbed in a literary consciousness that has no urge to moralise or proselytize. It's a remarkable book, if for this alone; its lack of pretension. And, in its very ordinariness it both attains and retains the dignity of its vivid life.

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Beautiful and bittersweet.

Never has a portrait of a simple tragedy been painted so poignantly as in Carson McCullers' novel "The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter", the story of a small Southern town, and more specifically, a few select people in the town, and their interaction with a gentle deaf mute named John Singer. The characters confide their hearts and feelings into Mr. Singer, who they have no way of communicating with, and treat him as the closest and most dear of friends without ever knowing a thing about him outside of a few words he scribbles on pieces of paper from time to time. McCullers' writing is masterful and eloquent, providing an insight into not only the Southern culture of her time, but the nature of the human heart itself.

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One of My All Time Favorites

I'm so excited to see this book in Oprah's Book Club because its always been one of my favorites. Now so many others will get to experience the lives of these rich and earthy characters and oh and ah at the way McCullers puts ordinary words together that roll off the pages in a very extraordinary way to make this an unforgettable story. Don't pass up an opportunity to read this book; its one of those rare books that you will hardly be able to wait to go to bed with.

I know it's shallow to call a book boring, but....

This book is awfully dull. When I started it, I went around telling everyone how great it was! The two deaf mutes made a funny, quirky couple. Then a second character was introduced: Jake Blount the drunk. His story was interesting also and I really cared about him. But then another and another character are introduced until we get nothing but character introductions and little to link them (they all talk with the deaf guy). There's a side story about a black man who wants his children to grow up as scholars which I found generic. He was so contrived and I couldn't believe how superior the author tried to make him look by having him give a speech about the values of Karl Marx at a Christmas party, while all the other negroes just stood by passively and asked dumb questions.

The book is so boring that at the halfway point there is a shooting of a young girl and I was happy about it! Finally some action! But then nothing becomes of that and we're back to the humdrum story.

To sum up, it was dull, contrived and generic. It was like reading Faulkner for Dummies, with every message slapped in your face instead of implied.

Only recommend as a character study.

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