Extract

In the town there were two mutes, and they were always together.

A deaf man sits in a cafe in a small Georgia mill town and says nothing, and because he says nothing, four lonely people pour their hearts into him, believing he understands what no one else will hear. Carson McCullers published this novel in 1940 at twenty-three, and its portrait of isolation in the American South has the strange authority of a work by someone who understood loneliness not as a condition to be cured but as the fundamental weather of human experience. Each character orbits John Singer as though he were a sun, but Singer himself orbits another deaf man who does not care for him at all. The architecture of unreciprocated devotion is the novel's true subject, a chain of longing in which every link faces the wrong direction.