Books in Brief

Clock Without Hands, by Carson McCullers (Houghton Mifflin, $4). Carson McCullers once wrote a perfect story: “The Sojourner,” about a man who was exactly that, an expatriate who came home for his father’s funeral, ran by chance into his ex-wife and had a drink with her, her second husband, and their child. She wrote another (I do not remember its name), almost as good, about a young mother, transplanted from her home in the South to a corporation suburb in Rockland County, where she began to drink and to grow careless with the children. What these stories shared with Miss McCullers’ more celebrated fiction was her matchless feeling for the chasm between some people and the circumstances of their lives, her feeling for the social failure, for the condition in which some social cog is irrevocably missing. What Miss McCullers knew then and seems to have forgotten in Clock Without Hands, her newest novel, is that her characters are, in exactly that sense, special cases: the world is full, after all, of people who do mesh, who marry young men who work for the National City Bank, who join the Young Republicans and commute happily to Rockland County by way of a car pool, who, whatever their three-o’clock-in-the-morning terrors, do manage to function socially. It was precisely their existence that gave Miss McCullers’ early fiction its point: her characters were misfits and grotesques— deaf mutes, adolescents, midgets, dying men—who in their extremity suggested what was hidden and dark in everyone, even Young Republicans. In Clock Without Hands, however, she has tried to make believe that those rather Gothic characters of hers make up society itself, rather than exist outside it; they discuss integration, control or failure to control riots, and comment upon mob behavior. It is rather like sending Annabel Lee out on a ILGWU strike, and it simply does not do.

J. DIDION

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Clock Without Hands, by Carson McCullers (Houghton Mifflin, $4). Carson McCullers once wrote a perfect story: “The Sojourner,” about a man who was exactly that, an expatriate who came home for his father’s funeral, ran by chance into his ex-wife and had a drink with her, her second husband, and their child. She wrote another (I do not remember its name), almost as good, about a young mother, transplanted from her home in the South to a corporation suburb in Rockland County, where she began to drink and to grow careless with the children. What these stories shared with Miss McCullers’ more celebrated fiction was her matchless feeling for the chasm between some people and the circumstances of their lives, her feeling for the social failure, for the condition in which some social cog is irrevocably missing. What Miss McCullers knew then and seems to have forgotten in Clock Without Hands, her newest novel, is that her characters are, in exactly that sense, special cases: the world is full, after all, of people who do mesh, who marry young men who work for the National City Bank, who join the Young Republicans and commute happily to Rockland County by way of a car pool, who, whatever their three-o’clock-in-the-morning terrors, do manage to function socially. It was precisely their existence that gave Miss McCullers’ early fiction its point: her characters were misfits and grotesques— deaf mutes, adolescents, midgets, dying men—who in their extremity suggested what was hidden and dark in everyone, even Young Republicans. In Clock Without Hands, however, she has tried to make believe that those rather Gothic characters of hers make up society itself, rather than exist outside it; they discuss integration, control or failure to control riots, and comment upon mob behavior. It is rather like sending Annabel Lee out on a ILGWU strike, and it simply does not do.

J. DIDION