FBR 76: The Divine Collusion . . .

Carson McCullers gives Mick Kelley, the complex twelve-year-old girl at the center of The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, both the tortured and splendid parts of herself when she was young. In one scene almost exactly midway through the book, Mick is with her brothers and a neighborhood boy, waiting — as in so many scenes in this novel — for sluggish Time to pass. For Life to move on. For things to be altered forever. Suspended in the porch heat of the long afternoon, even as the reader becomes...