The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter. Yet another for the new-to-me book club, which is turning out to have great selections (although I was already reading this one when G. decided to pick it for the club). This was at least my third attempt with this one, and I’m not sure why I could never get into it before. It’s a deceptively easy read, hiding a deep, meaty novel behind a simple southern coming-of-age facade. I found myself thinking about it constantly during the time I was reading it, and for a week or more afterward.

Mostly the question that bugs me is whether this novel believes in God, if you’ll pardon the phrasing. I decided that I did not think that Singer was a Christ figure, exactly, but you can see him as a god figure if you mean that in an atheist sense. Each of the three characters who mythologize Singer has some big all-encompassing obsession that separates him or her from other people: Mick has music, Copeland has his “one true purpose,” and Blount has socialism. Singer winds up being not so much their connection to the divine, but their connection to humanity — except it is a very false and selfish connection, since they see him as a mirror rather than as a person. So to see Singer as a Christ figure is to see Christ/god in really very atheistic terms, as a human creation to fill a lack in the self.

I will definitely be reading this again. This is one of the great American novels.

(I listened to the reading by Cherry Jones, which is excellent, and also skimmed the actual book in preparation for discussing it with the book club.)