Book Review: Clock Without Hands was Carson McCullers' last novel, written during long, debilitating illnesses, published six years before her death. The story has her powerful writing, intriguing characters, and is set at the beginning of the civil rights movement. It has all the elements to succeed, but doesn't quite pull together to be as brilliant as it should be (and as I expected). Still a good read, enjoyable, quick, revelatory, yet for me it felt distant, with little sense of immediacy, distracted. The climactic incident is rushed and buried. There are four main characters but the depiction of each has a flaw: one somewhat unbelievable; another nearly too watery to care about; one challenging and meaningful, but repetitive; and the most complex, contradictory, and interesting character is almost a caricature, but that's a judgment call. Seems that McCullers began with a central character, the Judge, an all too human "typical" Southerner, but written as an individual, with qualities that belie the stereotype so that he becomes an actual person. A devout narcissist who believes he must fit the role he was raised to, in the only way he knows how to live, the set of beliefs and actions that he must wear, even as his mind is going. Two of the other characters are less fully drawn, but still help create the four elements that comprise the story. The Judge's grandson, whose past was kept from him and so has no direction in life until he learns the new South can include the Atticus Finch he's determined to become. A young black man who feels the pain of injustice, but in his core really wants to become a man of culture, taste, learning -- one who cannot be disparaged by any white man. Frustrated at a life without possibility, he takes a step that he hoped would never come. And the most meaningful character, a dying man who's never acted freely, who sees a life never lived (a life of easy bigotry), who never became a person, and faced with his death he sees the loss of his soul: "He was a man watching a clock without hands." A man before a chasm, staring at death, for the first time finds the courage to take a stand, who finally becomes a human being despite the cost. The remainder of his life matches the length of the story. For all the characters time is the catalyst that drives Clock Without Hands. McCullers obviously had great aspirations for the novel, addressing not only her usual concerns of loneliness, isolation, and confused sexuality, but the new political and social movement of the Fifties, the role of race in the South. There is a great novel lurking within. McCullers again creates a community of souls as in her other books, but here they do not balance and complement. The four are disjointed and the characters fail to mesh as they should, being built at different levels of complexity, meaning, and credibility. Clock Without Hands is well worth reading (everything by McCullers is), but doesn't match her best. Though a good reader will easily see how it could have. [3½★]
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