http://straycarrierpigeon.com/2009/10... ( )

The book, The Member of the Wedding, is a classic. It focuses on the same problems of today's YAs: the awkwardness of being an adolescence and yet the possibility of living your dreams, humiliation, rejection, and the awakening experience of growing from an adolescent to the harsh reality of being an adult.

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As I shamefully admitted a couple of weeks ago, when one of my reading group suggested we read something by Carson McCullers I looked around bemused and asked, “Who?” Having done a bit of background research before beginning The Member of the Wedding I feel slightly better about this. I realise that I was just too young to have read it when it was ‘the’ book that teens and young twenties were reading and the fact that it has just been re-issued in a Vintage Classics edition perhaps suggests that there hasn’t been much of a stir about McCuller at least in the UK since then. Which, if it is true, is a shame, because this is a very fine piece of writing indeed.
Twelve year old Frankie lives with her father in a small town somewhere in the Southern States. Her mother having died when she was born, the only real female influence in her life has been Berenice, the Black woman who comes in each day to help out. The majority of the book covers just two days at the close of a sultry August at the end of the Second World War. Frankie’s elder brother, Jarvis, is home on leave and the family are preparing to travel to celebrate his wedding to Janice at her home in Winter Hill. Frankie is in that traumatic stage between childhood and adolescence when knowing who you are and where you belong changes if not quite from minute to minute, then certainly from hour to hour. No longer able to relate comfortably to her small cousin, John Henry, she is leaving behind childish things, but doesn’t yet fit into the world of the teenage girls whose group she longs to join. Her body is betraying her mind and emotions and she is like those leggy Labradors who are neither puppy nor dog, but all flying feet and loose limbs which they can’t quite control. Understandably, she feels isolated and afraid. Hence her passionate desire to become a Member of the Wedding, to be taken into the family that her brother and his fiancé will be creating as an equal partner. That she can even think this is possibly is evidence of how far from being an adult she still is but that is not how she sees it. She imagines the three of them taking off around the world and her life finding a stability which at present it lacks.
Frankie is searching for an identity. She has lost all sense of who she was and has no idea as to who she is to become.
Very early in the morning she would sometimes go out into the yard and stand for a long time looking at the sunrise sky. And it was as though a question came into her heart, and the sky did not answer. Things she had never noticed much before began to hurt her: home lights watched from the evening sidewalks, an unknown voice from an alley. She would stare at the lights and listen to the voice, and something inside her stiffened and waited. But the lights would darken, the voice fall silent, and though she waited, that was all. She was afraid of these things that made her suddenly wonder who she was, and what she was going to be in the world, and why she was standing at that minute, seeing a light, or listening, or staring up into the sky: alone. She was afraid and there was a queer tightness in her chest.
McCullers is brilliant at creating characters in whom we entirely believe. Even at a distance of over forty years I can remember feelings that were not dissimilar to those expressed by Frankie and a friend who first read it when she was eighteen said quite simply, “I thought she was writing my story.” Also superbly drawn is Berenice. I’m guessing here, but I imagine that writing such a sympathetic portrait of a Black servant, a portrait that shows her to have a great deal more practical common sense than anyone else we encounter, would have had an element of controversy about it in the 1940s; it certainly helps to give a timeless quality to the book today.
Most impressive about this author’s writing, however, is her use of language. Time and again I found myself jotting down phrases that I would be hard pressed to explain precisely but which I understood through some sense more fundamental than any words. There are, for example, multiple images to do with music - a jazz sadness quivered her nerves - and a turning pointin the story comes when Frankie becomes aware of a silence that stands in stark contrast to the world to which she is used.
This is a book I am really grateful to have read. I’m told that the rest of McCuller’s output is much bleaker. Does anyone know if that’s the case? I do want to read more of her work, but this was quite an emotional roller-coaster and I may have to put some space between it and other novels if they are indeed going to ask even more in terms of empathy and compassion.

3144. The Member of the Wedding, by Carson McCullers (read Jan. 4, 1999) I saw this book listed on a list called "Outstanding Books for the College-Bound" and it was one of the few books thereon which I had not read, so I thought I should--tho it is awhile since I was college-bound. I found this book, tho superbly written, not too interesting. The central character's odd behavior did not excite my concern. I decided I should have read this book in 1955, when I read McCullers' The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter. ( )

Twelve-year-old Frankie is fed up with her small town life where the only things that change are for the worse. Then one day, her brother announces he is getting married and the next two weeks take Frankie on a whirlwind as she becomes obsessed with the wedding and the new life she could have if her brother and his wife would only take her with them. This coming of age story was beautifully written. I was drawn into McCuller's world, smelling the smells and feeling the heat. Even though this is such a short book, it was a slow, leisurely read. I found myself stopping and savouring the scenes before I could start to read again. This book leaves me with a wistful, melancholy feeling. This is my second McCuller's book and I rather enjoy her not-so-happy endings. Recommended. ( )