ROCK AND ROLL It turns out that Miss McCullers did most of her great writing - most of her entire writing - before she was 30. Rock and roll! After 30 she was too busy having ghastly illnesses and marrying the same guy three or four times, and dodging invitations to a suicide pact from the guy she married all those times. So when she was 22 - I ask you!

The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers; Trade Paperback; $7.50. More information. CommuniTea Books. The Glass Castle: A Memoir ePub (Adobe DRM) download by Jeannette Walls Memoirs.

- she wrote this first novel which is a stone American classic. I had heretofore thought that absorbing a ton of influences and developing a unique voice all by the age of 22 had only been done by Lennon/McCartney, Bob Dylan and Aubrey Beardsley, but Miss McCullers performs this remarkable feat too.

Her surefootedness and precision are fantastic. I'm so much in awe that I feel sick to my stomach. METAPHORS FOR GOD WHICH IS A METAPHOR ALREADY Onto the book itself.

The inexorable gravitational pull of the metaphor in all our verbal dealings is something I have mentioned before, so that even someone like Raymond Carver's ironed-flat tell-it-like-it-is bargain-basement prose still spins in stories like So Much Water So Close to Home or A Small Good Thing brilliant metaphorical explorations of the various uncomfortable truths he shoves our way (the ignored corpse, the tasteless birthday cake). Perhaps we no longer love overly obvious metaphors (Little Red Riding Hood) - then again, perhaps we do (The Titanic). But they're very useful when you try to talk about God - in fact it's impossible to talk about God non-metaphorically insofar as God is Himself a metaphor. Fictionmakers love God metaphors - last year we had Ron Currie's disappointing 'God is Dead', a few years back we had the smart Jim Carey movie 'The Truman Show', further back we have other movies like 'Whistle Down the Wind' and 'Theorem'.

In 'The Heart is a Lonely Hunter' John Singer, the deaf mute, the blank slate, the man who everyone talks to but who talks to nobody, stands for God. Tusau keser zhiri pesnya. People pour out their dreams, fears & hopes onto him and he scribbles the odd bland sentence in reply and they think he understands all and knows all. In fact - and here's Miss McCullers' audacious vicious twist - John Singer is himself completely obsessed with another deaf mute who he thinks of as almost Godlike but who in fact is a fat greedy imbecile confined to a mental asylum.

If we follow the metaphor along, not too fancifully I think, we find that Antonapoulos the idiot therefore represents the human race, with which God/Singer is fatally, poignantly, uselessly obsessed - Antonapoulos will never get well and was a sad mistake to begin with - so what does that say about the rest of us chickens? BRIEF ACTS OF APPALLING VIOLENCE Miss McCullers doesn't belabour this central conceit too much and she also throws in a ton of local knowledge but without smacking you upside the head every time like Annie Proulx does.

And although this is a slow old read at times, a lot of doing nothing punctuated by brief acts of appalling violence (is this what the American South is like?), her sad sweet song of humanity is as beautiful a tune as I've heard all year. I simply cannot get this book out of my head. Like most everyone else I am astounded that Carson McCullers was only 23 years old when she wrote this. Such wisdom and insight from someone so young is truly remarkable. And there are so many great reviews out there, I just could not stop reading them. A great many of them, as one might expect discuss the greater themes of this book and there can be no doubt that I too fell to pondering these many things as I thought about the world today. I mean just think about it: Racial inequality and discrimination Economic division of the classes Subjugation and objectification of women and minorities Social Injustice War Still I would like to talk for just a minute or two about another constant thread within this story and perhaps the best way to begin is to tell you about something that happened to me.