Oh my, this was very, very good. It made me feel all sad and stirred-up inside, particularly the first half (all the going on about fascism in the later parts was fine, I suppose, but seemed to me almost beside the point considering what had come before).
The inside front page of my secondhand Penguin edition quotes Graham Greene as saying that "Miss McCullers and perhaps Mr Faulkner are the only writers since the death of D. H. Lawrence with an original poetic sensibility" and I reckon that phrase - 'an original poetic sensibility' - gets it just right. It's one of those books where, trying to pin down what it is that I like so much about it, all I can come up with is 'there's just something about it'...there's craft in it, but more than that, it's the overall style and sensibility, both intangible but woven into every line, which distinguishes The Heart is a Lonely Hunter and gives it its impact.
In many ways, Singer stands at the centre of the book, but it's the characters over whom he exerts his strange fascination - Biff Brannon, Jake Blount, Doctor Copeland, and most of all Mick Kelly - who most touch and linger, which may be precisely the point. Only the truly specific can be universal, I've heard it said; be that as it may, just such a path is taken by McCullers here, and to wonderful effect. I've taken it a bit to heart.
