Reading this book, I imagined I felt something like a series of detonations in my chest - it brings on a sense of being half-stifled by (and at once yearning towards) something inexpressible. There's something of it in Berenice's attempt to articulate the feeling that the darkening, late-afternoon conversation between her, Frankie and John Henry has been circling around on the day before the wedding:
'I think I have a vague idea what you were driving at,' she said. 'We all of us somehow caught. We born this way or that way and we don't know why. But we caught anyhow. I born Berenice. You born Frankie. John Henry born John Henry. And maybe we wants to widen and bust free. But no matter what we do we still caught. Me is me and you is you and he is he. We each one of us somehow caught all by ourself. Is that what you was trying to say?'
Someone, I can't remember who, once said that the mark of an artist - or a poet, perhaps - is the ability to take feelings and emotions experienced by others and then to intensify them, and that's what McCullers is about, both here and in The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, which made such an impression on me when I came across it a while back. In The Member of the Wedding, she does so through the confusedly urgent thoughts and sensations of Frankie Addams, almost thirteen years old, as summer fades into autumn in 1940s small town southern America and Frankie's brother's imminent wedding becomes the focus of her inchoate grasping for some clearer sense of herself and her relationship to the world; it's convincing, in all its heightenedness, because it's presented to us through the prism of early adolescence, that time when everything was urgent and important, when the world was a source of limitless potential and unclear hopes and at the same time of constant constraints, when things were continually just beyond expressing and understanding, and all things were always changing...the magic, though, is in the way it reminds us that that state, in fact, persists all through our lives, obscured and muffled though it becomes in the passage into adulthood...a book to take to heart.
(I wonder, incidentally, if this is where Frankie magazine, to which I took out a subscription a few months ago, gets its name from - apt, if so.)
