Our Take

The novel's central irony—that a deaf-mute man becomes the emotional center of an entire community—is not a gimmick but a thesis. McCullers understood that listening, or the appearance of listening, is among the rarest and most powerful things one person can offer another. Singer doesn't speak, doesn't advise, doesn't judge. He simply receives. And the people around him project onto that silence everything they most need someone to understand.

What makes the novel endure is McCullers's refusal to sentimentalize any of it. The connections her characters form with Singer are real and transformative and also, in important ways, illusory—and she holds both of those truths simultaneously without resolution. The book is quietly devastating in a way that accumulates rather than announces itself.

Readers who loved To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee or Wise Blood by Flannery O'Connor will find McCullers in essential Southern literary company. Also a powerful pairing with Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston. One of the great American novels, and long overdue for a new generation of readers.