Book Response: "The Heart is a Lonely Hunter" by Carson McCullers

I knew what I was walking into when my book club chose "The Heart is a Lonely Hunter" by Carson McCullers for this month's discussion. I read the book eleven years ago, and I can still remember the feeling when I turned the last page. I remember feeling as though I had experienced something profound, but I wasn't quite sure how to articulate it to others. Since my book club isn't meeting for several more weeks, I figured blogging my thoughts would keep them more organized for later discussion.

If you've ever seen the movie Love Song for Bobby Long, McCullers' book features prominently as a bonding device for disparate and isolated characters. That seems right to me given that the story follows five characters that feel disconnected from everyone around them. Isolation is a prominent theme in the book, and it's interesting that these characters even seem to sabotage or turn away from opportunities to express themselves and experience genuine connection with others. McCullers captures the modernist plight of man in an industrialized society, specifically in the south in the years following The Great Depression.

Book Review: "The Lacuna" by Barbara Kingsolver

I'd like to start out by saying that I am a fan of Barbara Kingsolver. I have now read all of her novels, sans her nonfiction work and essays. I had just finished listening to her narration of her book Flight Behavior through Audible, and was excited that my book club had chosen The Lacuna as the next read.

I don't want to say I was disappointed, but I was surprised. Kingsolver's stories usually have compelling characters at the helm, narrators that become something like friends. But in The Lacuna, our protagonist is so distant from the reader that the work suffers to deliver us a truly satisfying story. With a passive protagonist, the question becomes "who is steering this story?", and the answer is so clearly Kingsolver's interest in history. Our protagonist, Harrison Shepherd, is a leaf on the wind of history, like Forrest Gump, but way less interesting. I'm on board with this approach, but not at the sacrifice of a character I care about to bring me through the times.

The novel is an ambitious endeavor for Kingsolver, and a return to the scene after nine years without publishing anything. I imagine much of that time was filled with research for The Lacuna, which spans across the U.S. and Mexico, the great depression, the surrealist art movement, WWII, Japanese internment, communism and the red scare. It's an ambitious stretch through History, and definitely provokes reflection upon some of the darker aspects of America's past. Many parallels can be drawn between the political environment of post WWII America and today's national climate, especially when it comes to journalism.