Reading this novel has been an exhausting, draining experience. It very slowly sneaks up on you and then punches you in the stomach, metaphorically speaking. I found myself growing increasingly tense the longer I read, until I finally reached an important moment in the plot and burst into nervous, exhausted tears. That makes it sound like a really awful experience, but it was so beautiful and spare and lovely and heartbreaking, I couldn't recommend it highly enough.

I like to get into Southern writers in the summertime; something about small towns and loose women and sweet tea and lonely men in cheap sweaty clothing really does it for me. These books are tragic, as a rule, which as a Northerner, I have very little sympathy for or understanding of, but it certainly makes for compelling fiction. The past few summers I've spent a lot of time with the likes of William Faulkner and Truman Capote, which I really really loved, and will certainly be blogging about someday, but this summer is all about the Southern ladies, which for me means Eudora Welty, Flannery O'Connor, and Carson McCullers.

You knew from looking at that picture on the cover that this was going to be a sad book-- how could a woman who looks like that in an official portrait write anything that wasn't exhaustingly heartbreaking? The Heart is a Lonely Hunter centers on a deaf mute man living in a Georgie mill town, who for whatever reason seems to draw in those around him; various townsfolk come to him for companionship and confession, and remain oblivious to his own internal world, which even the reader only glimpses in small slices. Every character in the novel feels so alive and knowable, and seems to reflect a breadth of observation on McCuller's part, though she was only 23 when it was published.