The Heart is a Lonely Hunter: Still A Beauty, Still A Bummer

It’s okay to be sad and lonely, especially when you can be sad and lonely together.

Yes, yes, I know it’s so ironic that I complained about single-line quotation marks for so long, then read a book without them, then ordered an “American” copy of The Heart is a Lonely Hunter only to realize it was written with single quotes the whole time. I am really talented at book design.

It took me longer to read this book than I remembered from last time, partially because of my whole can’t-concentrate-when-dense-book-is-on-iPad thing I complained about with And the Mountains Echoed. I’m 99% sure that’s just a screens thing for me right now since as soon as I had a print copy of Heart in my hands I flew through the last 200 pages or so in one sitting.

General thoughts: I am sad, oh God I’m sad, the Great American Novel

The Heart is a Lonely Hunter still is, surprise surprise, a total bummer. But in an artistically beautiful way, where you want to watch a foreign film and get drunk on a bottle of gin then go start a fight in an art gallery or something.

**SPOILERS AHEAD!**

I read it for the first time in high school (although honestly? That shit is HEAVY for 10th or 11th grade, whenever it was I read this book). At the time I thought it was beautiful and upsetting, dense but the kind where once you get into the rhythm you feel extremely smart and superior for understanding.

And like every teenager in the entire world I identified so strongly with Mick Kelly — at the time, I think I was still in my “I want to be an actor” phase, so Mick giving up her love of music for the good of her family felt like something I needed to cry about and pen into my journal. Maybe get a meaningful stick-and-poke tattoo or two.

I remember thinking Jake Blount was a psycho, Doctor Copeland was a waste of space, Portia was annoying (still stand by that one, actually), and that John Singer was the American South’s answer to Gandhi.

This time around, I actually kind of “got” what Jake Blount was getting at. His rants against capitalism and the ways of the world made a little more sense to me, maybe because I’m a little more “growed up” and I’ve experienced some of the bad sides of capitalism (lookin’ at you, taxes).

I still love Mick Kelly and want to buy her several pianos and protect her from the world, but I also saw her as more of a child this time around too. I still see pieces of myself at that age in her (Carson McCullers did too, Mick is basically a self-insert) but I also see more of her pigheadedness and childlike certainty that only she knows the true ways of the world.

And interestingly, her sacrifice at the end of the book didn’t hit as hard as I expected it to — but it meant a lot more.

Characters and empathy: Carson’s got it right

All right, Maggie, what the hell does that mean?

I suppose my point here is that Mick Kelly is the easiest character to empathize with in the novel — and I think McCullers did that on purpose. All the other main characters have major critical flaws that set off their loneliness: Jake Blount is an alcoholic, Doctor Copeland is mean and sometimes violent, Biff Brannon is a coward (and sometimes, kind of a pedophile?).

Mick’s only crime is that she’s a kid.

That makes her story all the more sad — you can tell she’s got a good head on her shoulders, and her obvious affinity for music makes it clear that she could really make something of herself given the right opportunities. She’s the one who holds on to hope the longest, and seems to have the most to lose once Singer is gone.

Oh, John Singer. What is it about literary deaf-mutes that make them the most compelling characters on Earth?

(The other literary deaf-mute I’m referring to here is Nick Andros, the absolute best character in The Stand and no, Stephen, I will NEVER FORGIVE YOU.)

I found it interesting that John Singer lost a lot of his mystical appeal to me during this readthrough. In high school, I felt like he was this wise, all-knowing being, attributing much of the magic and omniscience to his character that the four other main characters do in the novel.

But this time, I saw him for what he is (and what he’s meant to represent, maybe, too?): just a man who’s been through a lot, is extremely lonely, and is suffering with his own problems even as the people around him think he’ll be able to solve all of theirs.

Closing thoughts: It’s okay to be lonely as long as everyone else is lonely too

At its heart, the book is about being lonely (and something about hunters, har dee har har).

I was a little worried when I started reading it that it would hurt more this time around, and it sort of did? But also more than that it meant more — I understood the characters better now that I was just reading the book and looking for ways it might impact my own writing rather than highlighting sections to make myself sound smart in an English project.

What McCullers does so well is the development of these characters that feel so real that they seem to come alive and fight their way out of the pages. We all have a drunk uncle who can stand in for Jake Blount. We’ve all met a working professional who’s ten thousand times smarter than we are and full of so much anger that we just kinda raise our eyebrows and walk into the other room. (That’s Doctor Copeland, if anyone was confused.)

It’s interesting to me because these characters have stayed with me for so long — when I picked up the book again, I remembered all of their names and personalities, and although I had to guess at some of the plot points of the book it all came sweeping back to me within the first 50 pages.

That’s masterwork: A book that makes you so sad and touches your soul so deeply that you remember it with close perfection years later.

And a side note: Confession time

I don’t want to end on a bummer, so instead I’ll end on a dirty confession. When I was in high school, I was in the throes of my biggest addiction of all time: Gaia Online.

Anyone who was under the age of 25 and on the internet in the noughties and early teens knows what I’m talking about. This was a glorified doll dress-up site where you had a little avatar and gave him or her cool clothes (they never introduced nonbinary avatars but they did at least start including gender-neutral clothing and hairstyles) and played little minigames and talked with your friends.

The site imploded a few years ago because of a major boom and subsequent crash in the site’s virtual economy (it’s a long story, but basically as soon as the admin team started letting people pay real money for virtual currency, the whole thing exploded).

But in its heyday, Gaia was THE place for virtual roleplaying. And I’m not talking about like furries and weird horny stuff (although there was plenty of that too), but text-based “games” that were basically long-form Round Robin stories. Everyone had their own characters, wrote between a paragraph and a wall of text explaining what your character was doing, and you worked off of what all the other characters were writing and doing to tell your side of the story.

In other words, Gaia Online was simply the shit.

All right, now’s time for my confession: In an effort to seem extremely cool and well-read, one of my many account names was Mick Corrigan, after our girl, the one and only Mick Kelly.

Don’t ask me where I got Corrigan from, because I can’t tell you. (Maybe it was a reference to Morrigan, the badass witch from Dragon Age: Origins? The timeline is right, I was in that phase too. Although now I’m thinking of it, I remember “Corrigan” being the last name of some other book character, but I’ll have to do some digging to find out if that’s right.)

I got locked out of that account for some reason — I probably yelled at someone in the forums or something — and named my next avatar “madyben”. All lowercase like that because I was just so freaking cool and well-read.

So, yeah. The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. Simultaneously a breathtaking piece of literature and edgy enough to have a teen devote the closest equivalent she had to LiveJournal to characters from the story.

God, I was such a nerd.

And finally, a progress report!

I’m about a week into the unofficial start of the project now (ironic that I’ve done so much already when I’m technically not supposed to start until April 1st, but that’s just how I roll).

In that time, I’ve read three books off my assigned list (plus one bonus) and written a grand total of (drum roll, please) 6,374 words.

To be fair, a good chunk of that 6.7K is reworking the same short story a couple of times, but I’m only counting what I’ve typed up, and not the ten or so pages of longhand I’ve put into that scene journal. I’m keeping a “packet” on my computer with my total word count thus far, and I’m pretty happy with 6.7K. That’s 6.7K more than I had at the beginning of the month!

And in the name of accountability, I’ll note that I’m taking the weekend ~mostly~ off from writing to be a human and laze around with my dogs, but I’m keeping up with my journaling and my reading (and this blog post got really long, wow) so that I’m in good shape and a good routine for a strong “start” on Thursday.

Next up, I’m due to read Fingersmith by Sarah Waters, which I’m very excited about — despite its single-quotation dialogue tags. I’ve heard it’s one of the best books of the 21st century and is also extremely horny.

And on that wildly professional note, I’ll wrap up this blog for today.

Til next time!
Mags