The 100 Greatest Literary Characters by James Plath

Author:James Plath [Curnutt, James Plath;Gail Sinclair;Kirk]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Published: 2019-04-04T16:00:00+00:00

But there’s one thing I would give anything for. And that’s a piano. If we had a piano I’d practice every single night and learn every piece in the world.

As the filmmaking Farrelly brothers might say, There’s Something about Mick—the main female character in Carson McCullers’s 1940 novel The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter. Maybe it’s the restless energy that comes from being on the cusp of adolescence. Maybe it’s the incongruence of a rough tomboy from a poor family hearing music in her head all the time and wanting to become a famous composer-conductor. Or maybe it’s that Mick is always thinking, and there’s so much for her to process as life tries to spin her in circles.

Biff Brannan notices. He owns a café two blocks from the house Mick’s parents’ opened to boarders after her father couldn’t find work. The youngest girl of six Kelly children, Mick stops in his café several nights a week for a hot chocolate and Biff always gives her a discount. He’s fascinated by this “gangling, towheaded youngster, a girl of about twelve” who wears “khaki shorts, a blue shirt, and tennis shoes—so that at first glance she was like a very young boy.” One night she asks to buy a pack of cigarettes and he asks if her parents know she’s out after midnight. After she leaves, Biff has second thoughts about selling her tobacco, not knowing she’s taken up smoking because at 5′6″ Mick is hoping cigarettes will stunt her growth. Biff “thought of the way Mick narrowed her eyes and pushed back the bangs of her hair with the palm of her hand. He thought of her hoarse, boyish voice and of her habit of hitching up her khaki shorts and swaggering like a cowboy in the picture show. A feeling of tenderness came in him.” That feeling makes him uneasy. Later in the novel, after Biff’s wife dies, he feels especially drawn to Mick again, wanting to “reach out his hand and touch her sunburned, tousled hair—but not as he had ever touched a woman.” That, too, makes him uneasy, for if it isn’t sexual, what is it?

When Mick’s own father needs to tell someone how isolated he feels being a provider who’s not providing, he turns to Mick, not his wife or her siblings. People at the vocational high school she attends also respond to her differently, because she received “special permission and took mechanical shop like a boy.” And at the house where Mick would sneak into a dark yard every night and hide in a bush next to a window to listen to Mozart and Beethoven playing on the radio, if the rich people who lived there knew about Mick they would also sense she’s far from typical. Then there’s Portia, the daughter of a black doctor in town who, despite the Kelly family’s poverty, works for them as their cook. Mick reminds Portia of her own father: neither goes to church, and neither seems sure about God.

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