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Clock Without Hands
by Carson McCullers
"It is the worst book I have ever read. It is incredible. If you want to read it, I will send it to you. It must signal the complete disintegration of this woman's talent. I have forgotten how the other three were, but they were at least respectable from the writing standpoint."— Flannery O'Connor
McCullers and O'Connor are easily the greatest female (and Southern Gothic) authors I have discovered—both being firmly in my top five all-time favorite authors. At times I think they are under-appreciated. Both have an incredibly intensified and peculiar sense of empathy that I can strongly identify and resonate with. In them there is a home that I rarely find in books, films, plays or actual people. This is the last of McCullers's novels that I could read and it feels like a sad goodbye, only her play now left to go.
This is the only McCullers novel (excluding short stories in The Ballad of the Sad Cafe) without any noteworthy female characters/perspectives/identities. This might be why O'Connor trashed the book, given that she normally writes entirely male POV narratives in a similar genre and she felt McCullers stepping into her territory. I personally think McCullers fares better at writing from the perspective of queer male and female characters (in comparison to herself and O'Connor) and from narratives which have more female characters. But still, I'm personally impressed with how much McCullers can realistically engage with complex emotional problems of troubled men, it takes a lot of human understanding and sympathy to craft some of these sentences.
This is how the world looked to a disillusioned man landing his plane:
From this height you do not see man and the details of his humiliation. The earth from a great distance is perfect and whole. But this is an order foreign to the heart, and to love the earth you must come closer. [...] From the air men are shrunken and they have an automatic look, like wound-up dolls. They seem to move mechanically among haphazard miseries. You do not see their eyes. And finally this is intolerable. The whole earth from a great distance means less than one long look into a pair of human eyes. Even the eyes of the enemy.
Unlike McCuller's other novels, I think there is a sociopolitical message here amongst the metaphysical musings. The 'Clock Without Hands' I feel refers to the idea that in general there is always a societal divide between a group of people in favour of traditional standards (turn back the hand of the clock) and another in favour of progressive change (turn forward the hand of the clock). I need not elaborate on how this might be relevant to the current political climate of the USA and UK and other countries at present. Progress for one is anarchy for another: societal progress per se is impossible when not all of its constituents agree on its definition, nor is any one definition guaranteed due to democratic vote. In this sense, the clock has no hands but those that we put upon it. McCullers does not seem to be arguing in favour of any one side, but that each person has a condition which they may well have been born into which makes them feel like their side is the right side, to the point of committing needless violence or martyrdom. The idea that societal progress can be neither defined or guaranteed can fill one with the same sense of dread and futility as not knowing when one's time of death will be, which is the main concern of the central characters.
Trying to keep this review relatively short, in all, this book is similar but less well-rounded than To Kill A Mockingbird. It feels incomplete and unbalanced as a narrative—easily not McCuller's finest in my eyes—but it raises similar sentiments than To Kill A Mockingbird, though being a stronger study of character than a criticism of the sadly still pertinent societal issues with race and gender.