Disjointed Novel

...Old Judge Clane, now eighty-five, maintains his identity through his file of clippings, proof enough that he was a Congressman and passed in his town for a statesman...

...Segregation, demagoguery, hatred, and violence affect each of the four chief characters, but their individual lives are not all vitally related...

...Even the title expresses an ambiguity...

...But when, in the last chapter, Malone's old friend Judge Clane bursts in with the news of the U.S...

...her people, uncertain of their own complexities of feeling, grope toward fulfillments which elude them...

...J. T. Malone, the druggist of Milan, Georgia, is dying of leukemia— a man confusedly watching his time run out on a clock without hands...

...Joy is transient, happiness impossible, and any character's sense of identity is the goal of an uncertain quest...

...It is uncertainty about her objective that weakens Clock Without Hands, her first novel in ten years...

...Supreme Court's school integration decision, the implication is that the justices' "all deliberate speed" is also to be measured by a clock without hands, and that the Southern dilemma has been symbolized through Malone, Judge Clane, Jester Clane, the Judge's grandson, and Sherman Pew, a Negro...

...McCullers began with The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, a novel she has not surpassed...

...Sherman Pew is far worse off than Jester, and his search for a self kills him...

...Reviewed by Donald Emerson CARSON MCCULLERS is the novelist of the loving and the isolated, whose defeats she portrays with understanding and tenderness...

...McCullers' characters...

...A Negro foundling, he is now Jester's age, and the two become friends in a complex and exasperating way...

...She is not now cool and ironic, as in Reflections in a Golden Eye, nor less capable of understanding the young than in The Member of the Wedding...

...Clock Without Hands is a sadly disjointed novel, yet it suggests possibilities that would flesh out a brace of thin, brainless fictions...

...McCullers* object, or whether the novel concerns each character's search for identity, or whether Jester's attainment of manhood and freedom is the theme...

...It was a mistake...

...The Judge's son was a suicide before Jester Clane was born, but he is a determining force in his own son's life...

...Malone rebels against his illness, but his forced acceptance of approaching death at last brings clear realization of what he has known unprotestingly for years—that his life is empty, and that somewhere he has lost his self...

...McCullers has attempted to make her characters stand for the whole South...

...Yet there is no clear central purpose...

...McCullers writes separate scenes which compare well with her best...

...The private and the symbolic roles of her characters undercut each other, to the reader's confusion...

...McCullers introduces many themes: the search for identity, the dilemma of the South, and the nature of love and passion and death, the question of responsibility, and the resort to violence...

...She portrays loving more than love...

...she is most herself as the novelist of inner experience...

...Jester at seventeen is beset by the questions, Who am I? What am I? He is one of the lonely and isolated, trying to reach others but frustrated by indifference where he seeks love, like so many of Mrs...

...The understanding, the tenderness, the humor and pathos are evident once more, but the plot is loose, and Mrs...

...In Clock Without Hands there are leaps in time and shifts in viewpoint which give one a feeling of looseness and discontinuity...

...He never recovers it, and he slips out of life quietly after refusing to endanger his possibly immortal soul by bombing Sherman Pew out of a house in a white neighborhood...

...Mrs...

...This senile old demagogue with foolish notions of the Southern past will condone violence if so many take part that no one man can feel responsible...

...Although the total effect is below her own standard, Mrs...

...One cannot discover a focus on any character...

...The frustrations of his life and the discovery of his origin drive Sherman to compulsive hatred and defiance, and in a town where Judge Clane heads the fraternity of hate that is enough to get him murdered...

...Blindly reactionary, the Judge is sustained by a last mad scheme for the redemption of Confederate currency, ten million dollars worth of which he holds...

...Malone, whose dying sets the time span of the novel, has little importance for Jester or Sherman or the Judge, who are central...

...Jester discovers his identity through understanding of his father...

...Either this was to have been a bigger book, or it should have been more tightly constructed...

...That it might have been bigger is apparent from its thematic richness and from the excellent scene of Jester and Sherman getting drunk together as they become friends, or the equally full scene of Jester declaring independence from the reactionary notions of his grandfather...

...they are attracted to each other, they share a love of music, and they continually wound each other's feelings...

...He too, as one of the "men of good will," refuses to accept Judge Clane's views, and turns away from violence...

...For her characters, fantasy often has the force of reality, and violence to their dreams can be as devastating as the cruelties of the real world...

...One is uncertain whether this was Mrs...