The Member of the Wedding by Carson McCullers
My rating: 4 of 5 stars “We all of us somehow are caught” or "The show is over and the monkey’s dead.” The twelfth summer of nearly thirteen-year-old Frankie Addams has been a "long season of trouble," and now she's caught in its never-ending August dog days. The imaginative tomboy has suddenly grown to 5’ 5" and is now too tall to stand under the bower she and some other kids have used as a stage for their dramas (of which she has written many, though never any featuring romance). Not that Frankie has any friends her own age anymore: she’s been kicked out of her girl’s club, and her best friend has moved away. She feels the world cracking and turning too fast. World War II drags on: the allies are in Paris and soldiers are passing through Frankie's hometown. Her cat Charles has disappeared. She has turned into a secret criminal, having pilfered a knife (she excels at throwing knives) and having sneaked her father's pistol out of the house and fired it. She wants to live somewhere else and wants to be someone else. Her summer has consisted mostly of hanging out with Berenice Sadie Brown, her family's ever 35-year-old African American cook with a blue glass eye, and John Henry West, her bespectacled, six-year-old cousin. But as Carson McCullers' The Member of the Wedding (1946) begins, something has just happened to wrack Frankie with undefinable, strange, and disturbing new questions and feelings: Her big brother Jaris and his fiance Janice visited, shocking Frankie with their intimacy and beauty. They'll be married this coming Sunday a hundred miles away in Winter Hill, and Frankie and her father are going, and she's decided that she's not coming back home after the wedding, because she’ll go live Jaris and Janice wherever they go. “You are the we of me.” Berenice has seen all kinds of crazy love, from men who fall in love with ugly women to women who fall in love with cloven-footed devils, but "I never heard of anyone falling in love with a wedding." When Berenice warningly asks Frankie, "What if they don't want you?" she replies, "I'll kill myself. But they will." The novel centers on the most crucial day in Frankie’s life, the day before the wedding, the last one (she passionately hopes) that she’ll spend in her southern hometown. The novel also relates Frankie’s memories of the ways in which she and Berenice and John Henry have spent the summer: playing bridge with a sticky deck, listening to the radio turned up loud, desultorily arguing with each other, listening to Berenice’s stories about her four husbands (each new one worse than the last), recalling the freaks at the county fair, and eating southern food (like Jumping Henry—peas and rice—ham knuckles, sweet potatoes, cornbread, and buttermilk). The novel also depicts Frankie’s wanderings around her home town, passing by the miserable prison, entering the shabby Blue Moon bar/hotel, shopping for an orange satin dress to wear to the wedding (tomorrow!), following the Monkey Man and his monkey (both of whom wear the expression of someone afraid of having done something wrong), getting her fortune told, and encountering a drunk soldier who thinks Frankie is older than she is. The novel does all that in three parts, each one featuring a different girl: Part One features Frankie (her nickname), Part Two F. Jasmine (her name to join Jaris and Janice), and Part Three Frances (her birth name). The interactions between Frankie and Berenice and John Henry are funny, charming, and touching, the three people of different ages, races, and genders treating each other with honesty (as when Berenice tells Frankie about her wedding dress, “I’m not accustomed to human Christmas trees in August") and circumspection (as when Berenice stops short of telling the kids about something appalling her fourth husband did to her). Sometimes they each other; sometimes they hold each other. Younger and more innocent than Frankie, John Henry steals the show, often plaintively asking, “Why?” McCullers writes great descriptions, like "The sun drunk blue jays screamed and murdered among themselves," and “The sound was enough to shiver the gizzards of musicians and make listeners feel queer,” not to mention "The cars drove slowly in a browsing way." She writes potent lines about life, like the following: “We all of us somehow are caught. We born this way or that way and we don’t know why. But we caught anyhow. I born Berenice. You born Frankie. John Henry born John Henry. And maybe we wants to widen and bust free. But no matter what we do we still caught. Me is me and you is you and he is he. We each one of us somehow caught all by ourself. Is that what you was trying to say?” Susan Sarandon reads the audiobook luminously, with a clear, compassionate voice and a complete understanding of everything going on above and below the surface, always managing to keep herself in the background while enhancing the text, never over acting, unlike the many professional actors who “perform” audiobooks, drawing attention to their virtuosity and distracting attention from the book itself. It's a pleasure to listen to her read the novel. She does a great Berenice ("dark gold voice" rough and low, earthy and wise, honest and kind), John Henry (high and sweet voice questioning and cute), Frankie (sensitive, self-centered, and imaginative voice between Berenice and John Henry in tone and pitch). The Member of the Wedding is a southern novel (with the food, climate, pace, race, etc.), but also a universal one (with the painful and clumsy and frank development of an exceedingly sensitive and imaginative girl into an adolescent). People who like that kind of thing, along with lots of humor and lots of pain, all beautifully written, should like it. View all my reviews
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