I had heard everyone's glowing reviews of The Heart is
a Lonely Hunter through Oprah's book club, and I was
excited to start reading this book, but after reading
Part 1, I was ready to give up. However, I'm glad I
picked it up again a few days later and finished it.
Still, the book was not quite what I envisioned, and
it does not make my list of favorite books. But I
realize I'm not much of a "classic novels" reader, so
that probably had a lot to do with how I felt about
this book.
I enjoyed the premise of this town full of misfits; a
drunk, a bar-keep, a teenage girl who's an outsider, a
deaf mute and a repressed black doctor and his family—all of which who made excellent characters. And once
the stories of these people really got going in Part
2, I was enjoying the reading. It's just that Part 1
really sets the stage for each of these characters, so
it's not very exciting reading. This is basically the
story of these lonely people and their daily struggles
to just get along in this world.
It took me a while to get into Carson's writing style,
which is a bit unique—for instance, there were times
when her sentence structure was kind of backwards.
I'm not sure if this is because that's how they spoke
in the 40's, or if it's McCullers' dialect. I will
say that this book did have some very poetic thoughts
and prose. There were several profound things
mentioned and discussed, and it made the reading all
the more worthwhile.
I do recommend this book for reading—just with the
warning that Part 1 is slow going, but if you make it
that far, you'll be rewarded in Parts 2 & 3. I don't
want to give anything away about this story, so I'll
leave it there.
