Geoffrey Fox's Reviews > The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter

A placid southern town is revealed to be torn by intense passions as McCullers takes us into the consciousness of several of its poor and lower middle-class citizens. The girl Mick Kelly comes of age (at 15), a radical drifter is defeated once again in his efforts to make the "Don't knows" understand how they're oppressed, the owner of the all-night New York Café watches it all, and the town's sole black physician finally bursts the dam of a lifetime of rage against white injustice. All these people confide in the sympathetic deaf-mute, believing he alone can understand them ­ but he doesn't, and he in turn attributes such deep understanding of his own emotions to a fat, self-centered deaf-mute moron. It is the black physician Dr. Benedict Mady Copeland who is the novel's most thoroughly imagined character besides Mick, who must be a version of McCullers herself, who was only 24 when this first novel appeared. 02-10-02