A podcaster I really enjoy once referred to having cool older siblings as "playing the game on easy mode", referring to high school. I have no idea how true this is; I'm older than my brothers by 10 years. However I do count myself really lucky to have had friends with cool older siblings. One of whom might be reading this now and scratching his head at the "cool" label, but can trust that to me at 16/17 there was no one I admired more.
He remains the sole inspiration for writing about every book I ever read, he was doing the same back when we were in high school. His was the first time I was ever so taken with a book review I had to rush out and buy the book. The subject of the review was the Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers.
I remember feeling a ringing truth in that review, and the first time I read the book, it rang even louder and for a long time. I have always counted it as a very formative experience to have read the novel, but with time (it's been almost two decades), it became hard to pinpoint exactly how, other than just kicking off a deep love of suffering fiction set in the south.
Having just finished for the second time, it is now abundantly clear. The book features four people with radical love in their hearts and no one to give it to. Jake, the alcoholic socialist who loves his fellow underclass, Mick whose coming of age story is all love of music and her little brother, Dr. Copeland the black doctor with fierce love of his people, and Biff, who kinda sucks honestly but loves children and sees in them endless hope.
While the cast is very lovable themselves, they struggle to articulate the love they hold to the people around them. This seems largely due to the fact that the South is an incredibly hostile place. Everyone is constantly beset by racism, violence, alcoholism, exploitation, and perhaps the most crushing of all; not being taken seriously by the stupidest people imaginable.
And McCullers can walk (drag) you through the frustration with the characters. You are very present as Doctor Copeland learns the atrocities committed against his son by racist cops, you feel Mick's starvation and fear for her siblings, Jake's sobbing bar fights, Biff's...weirdness. The great irony is that while no one quite understands these people, McCullers is making damn sure the reader understands.
The glue holding all of these people together is a deaf/mute resident of the town, Mr. Singer. The reader alone knows Mr. Singer's painful story, but to everyone else, he's their lone confidant. Mainly because he is kind and unassuming, he does not speak and only listens. His experience of the other characters mirrors the reader's as heaps of their soul is piled into him week over week.
On the second reading, I'm reminded of the power in The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. Whether it's scorched earth socialism and racial justice from Jake and Dr. Copeland (who comically hate each other despite both being avowed Marxists because of a disagreement on tactics, classic American leftists!) or the quieter moments of deep personal growth amidst despair that Biff and Mick undergo, it all packs heat.
It's one of the novels you finish and look around and wonder how nobody walking around in your life seems to have just been affected in the way you were. And like the characters in the novel, today it seems impossible to translate that feeling to anyone. Maybe that was always the point.