The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter

I was never smitten like many readers*, but it wasn't a full loss. I glimpsed its power and I’m thinking on it. This is a book on the American deep south about ten years into Great Depression. Race, poverty, cultural tensions live here, as does world chaos, Communism (or Communist idealism), and our personal isolation. Our author was 23 when it was published, and she maybe wrote from close awareness of these social tensions. But it's maybe a book that is more about our need for connection and understanding, and for acknowledgment.

It’s a simple story structure the follows five characters in a small southern town of about 30,000 people (based a lot on Columbus, GA). Each character represents an element of tension within the cities show more populace, except Singer, a deaf-mute orphan from Chicago who lives quietly. Singer’s muteness and ability to read lips and his kind patience acquires him a following of people who need someone to listen. He gives them a kind of symbolic spiritual totem, someone who understands in a malleable variety of ways individual to each speaker. But his muteness also means he doesn’t say much and no one really knows who he is or what his state of mind is. The other four main characters are each memorable. Biff Brannon owns The New York Cafe, and quietly and kindly observes his city, staying open all night because he personally likes that late-night clientele. Mick Kelly is a teenage girl in a big, impoverished family who takes in boarders, including John Singer. Jake Bount is an alcoholic mechanic preaching Communism, reading Marx over and over again. Doctor Benedict Mady Copeland is a negro doctor who hates the white supremacy, and the black lack of agency, who reads Spinoza by himself, and preaches Communism in the sense that blacks are the ultimate victims of American capitalism. And when Jake and Dr. Copeland speak, they argue bitterly.

The draping all of this on the simple story bones, through our five characters, leads to some extended simple narratives necessary to fill it the details of who and what these people are - individually and cumulatively. I found this made tough going. But other readers don't seem to mind. But this may be also what gives the book a very simple power that can run deep. I'll try to keep the idea of John Singer in my mind, and the idealism of Copeland and Jake Blount.

*rant: Among my problems with this book is the back cover that tells me Tennessee Williams called Carson "the greatest prose writer the South produced", which was a deranged thing to say. And Richard Wright admiring her ability to "embrace white and black humanity", which is iffy, kind but too worshipping. They broughy out my inner critic, gasping and ranting. And I couldn't quiet it down. I was annoyed at them and the book designer who put so much weight on this book. /rant

2026
https://www.librarything.com/topic/384249#9211941 show less

Carson McCullers wrote her first novel when she was just 23. The Heart is a Lonely Hunter is a series of character studies of five lonely people living in a mill town in Georgia in the closing years of the Great Depression. Singer is a deaf mute whose companion, another deaf mute, is institutionalized. Moving into a boarding house, he is befriended by a motley collection of loners, all who see him as understanding and sympathetic. Mick Kelly is entering her teenage years and is often responsible for the care of her two younger siblings. She is passionate about music and would love nothing more than to own a piano or even to have music lessons, but her family's financial situation, already precarious, becomes more and more desperate as show more time goes on. Dr. Copeland is the town's African American doctor and he fights everyday for the health and future of his people, even as he fears that no one is listening. His relationship with his children is tenuous and his own health is failing. Biff Brannon is the owner of a cafe, one that stays open at all hours. Brannon is a listener and a compassionate man, willing to let a debt slide or to help out someone who needs a place to stay. Jake Blount is perhaps the most interesting of the characters here. He sees and feels too strongly the suffering of the people around him and knows that if they would just rise up or even just understand what is going wrong, they could be saved. His passion has made him into a drunk, leaving him with nothing. These four lonely people look to Singer for solace and understanding, failing utterly to see Singer's own pain.

This is no heart-warming story of friendship and fried green tomatoes. There's no happy ending for anyone to be found. McCullers has written a brilliant book about suffering and loneliness. It's beautifully written and utterly heart-breaking. show less

Carson McCullers has a gift for writing about people’s inner monologs and desires, and how life very seldom, if ever, matches those things. The novel, and its language, are cemented in a 1930s rural mill town. The central character, John Singer, is a deaf mute, who is widely respected as someone who listens to others, but is he? The opening lines of the song from Midnight Cowboy come to mind, “Everybody is talking at me, I don’t hear a word they are saying”. Mr Singer is attentive, polite, agreeable, and sometimes writes a short note to explain himself. He offers crummy advice to Mick, a teenage girl who idolizes Mr. Singer. The foil to John Singer is the inflexible Dr. Copeland, who speaks eloquently, but nobody, not even his show more family, is listening. Mick is musical genius, who is not able to express herself, not even by making her own violin. Everybody is lonely, more so at the end, than at the start of the book, but great insights into our plight as humans. show less

To his friends, John Singer is the perfect confidant, the one person who really understands them; he’s the best listener they’ve ever known. He’s also deaf, and by his own choice, mute. A skilled lip reader, he reflects back to them, by expression, gesture, and a silver pencil and pad of paper, his sympathy and understanding. It’s an unusual assortment of people that befriend Singer: the owner of an all night restaurant, a disgruntled drunk, the town’s African American doctor, and his landlord’s teenage daughter. Except for Singer they don’t see that they have anything in common, as chapter by chapter their stories are revealed and their longings for each other are revealed to the reader, but never spoken to each other. show more

McCullers presents, without piteous or ironic commentary, a tragedy and social commentary set in an unnamed town, “in the middle of the deep South,” just before the outbreak of the Second World War. Her prose is clear and her characterization extraordinary. show less

What a fantastic book! I could write whole essays about this book and its presentation of the failure of American capitalism, the failure of interpersonal relationships, the tendency towards self-delusion, the death of the dream, the effects of trauma and intergenerational trauma, etc etc. It is terrifying that McCullers was only 23 when this book was published and yet the quality of the prose are way beyond anything I could have done at 23 (indeed, could do now I expect). Often described as 'southern gothic', for me this book is a literary version of 'socialist realism' - every word in its right place, revealing the cold realities of a brutal system that grinds to dust almost every man and woman. What a terrible time to be alive - show more American poverty worse than serfdom, fascism winning power in Europe, and Stalin's brutal purges systematically liquidating those who had already brought down one tyrant. show less

The young Carson McCullers could write, and draw characters, but an idea that would be spirited and worthwhile as a literary short story or novella becomes excruciating when drawn out to novel length. The well-named The Heart is a Lonely Hunter (the title comes from a turn-of-the-century Scottish poem) is a long, plotless display of earnest literary noodling; a collection of benign, banal and bracing interactions between a handful of characters in a town in the American South in the 1930s.

The book swirls the interactions of four characters (only one of whom, the young girl Mick Kelly, is memorable) around a fifth: a pleasant, placid deaf-mute named John Singer. Each of the four are strangely drawn to this man for reasons they don't show more know, only that he has some quality; he is "thoughtful and composed", with "gentle eyes" (pg. 87). He understands them intuitively, they think, but part of the author's aim here seems to be that they are projecting; they each describe "the mute as he [or she] wished him to be" (pg. 197) and fail to realise that this man is reluctant to communicate in kind. He doesn't unburden himself on them as they do on him, and while they are each wrapped up in their own dramas – the novel's title leading us to believe they are the directionless and lonely hunters – it eventually becomes apparent that John Singer is the loneliest and the most burdened. "She likes music," Singer writes of Mick Kelly in a letter to the one (unreciprocated) friendship he tries to cultivate. "I wish I knew what it is she hears. She knows I am deaf but she thinks I know about music." (pg. 190)

Now, McCullers' book is one of those where this sort of literary architecture only becomes clear after you have finished it, and perhaps studied it. It is a noble theme, and McCullers is sometimes a bit too aware of the nobility, overegging the portentousness of her prose (particularly the internal monologues of the characters) and the earnest sentimentality of the interactions. The totemic role of John Singer is an unsteady device; some have compared him to Christ, the gentle man who redeemed others by taking on their burden, but the device isn't seamless enough to overcome the reader's doubts about it. In uncharitable moments, I wondered whether Singer could be considered a rare white incarnation of the 'magic Negro' trope. A lot of goodwill is lost throughout the novel by the fact it doesn't seem to be going anywhere; even more is lost when the book descends into a tedious preachiness about race and socialism.

Some reviewers have compared the book to Steinbeck (perhaps in part because of the overt socialism), but this comparison doesn't sit well with me. Their writing styles are similar (though McCullers has none of the humour that Steinbeck deployed in, for example, Cannery Row), but in truth Steinbeck never used his characters as pawns in the way McCullers does (at least not as clumsily: the characters in East of Eden could be considered pieces placed on a chessboard). A more suitable comparison might be Faulkner, because of the Southern meandering, but I've not read enough of Faulkner to be able to state this with any conviction.

Perhaps the best way to conceptualise my disappointment in The Heart is a Lonely Hunter is to place it in a trifecta with Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird and Betty Smith's A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. Three female writers drawing characters from 1930s America and delivering a sense of humanity with warmth and homespun prose. But the Lee-Smith-McCullers triangle is isosceles rather than equilateral, and McCullers' novel is by far the least of the three. The other two are just a class above in delivering character, theme and, most importantly, depth. Too much of McCullers' book feels unearned – Singer's enigmatic qualities, his fondness for Antonapoulos, the other four characters' fondness for him – whereas the other two books can resist any sort of critical harrying. The comparison shows that, competent as it is, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter's play for literary greatness fell rather short. show less

Well, that was eviscerating. I am not sure that should not be my whole review, but I will say a bit more.

I know that Faulkner is considered to be the Dean of Southern Despair, but I would argue that Carson McCullers' depictiion of hollowness seems more honest and both more personal and somehow more universal than Faulkner's. When her people soldier on in the face of despair it somehow seems a less noble option than ending it all. It feels like they are chickens running around with their heads cut off. Already dead but beholden to their reflexes and maybe a dab of muscle memory. There is a discussion to be had about this topic, but it would be spoiler-laden, and I don't want to go there. It would be a hell of a book club discussion.

An show more extraordinary novel improbably written by a woman in her early 20s (she was 23 when it was published.) Read it if you want to be reminded of the power of literature. Don't read it if you want to feel good.

One note -- I read this on my Kindle, but in the last 1/3 switched off between text and audio. The audiobook is read by Cherry Jones, and it is exceptionally good. I am still glad I read this, the language is too good to not spend time with, but I think when I feel the need to be gutted again I will listen to the whole on audiobook. show less