Book Review: The Ballad of the Sad Cafe by Carson McCullers (1951)

Carson McCullers’ novella The Ballad of the Sad Cafe was first published in the magazine Harper’s Bazaar in 1943, then collected in a 1951 book that also collected McCullers’ other novels as well. Currently, The Ballad of the Sad Cafe is most often collected with six of McCullers’ short stories.  

The Ballad of the Sad Cafe tells the story of Miss Amelia, who opens a cafe in her small Southern town. The opening of the novella describes the bleak setting: “The town itself is dreary...the town is lonesome, sad, and like a place that is far off and estranged from all other places in the world.” (3)  

Miss Amelia is a fascinating character. She is perhaps the wealthiest person in the small town, and something of an outcast and loner. “She was a dark, tall woman with bones and muscles like a man. Her hair was cut short and brushed back from the forehead...There were those who would have courted her, but Miss Amelia cared nothing for the love of men and was a solitary person.” (4) As we can see from this excerpt, Miss Amelia is described as subverting the gender expectations of her time. Are we meant to interpret Miss Amelia as a queer character? I’m not sure, since we’re not given any clues that Miss Amelia is attracted to women.  

Everything changes in Miss Amelia’s life when a hunchback named Lymon Willis comes to town, claiming he’s a distant relative of hers. To the surprise of all, she welcomes Lymon in and lets him live in her house. She also turns her store into a cafe, and Miss Amelia becomes a most unlikely hostess.  

I read The Ballad of the Sad Cafe in high school, for a class on Short Novels, and I really enjoyed it at the time. One of the passages that has always stayed with me are four paragraphs about love. “First of all, love is a joint experience between two persons—but the fact that it is a joint experience does not mean that it is a similar experience to the two people involved. There are the lover and the beloved, but these two come from different countries...Almost everyone wants to be the lover. And the curt truth is that, in a deep secret way, the state of being beloved is intolerable to many.” (25-6) That idea has always fascinated me, that couples are comprised of a lover and a beloved. I’m not sure how accurate I find that idea to be in practice, but it’s a very interesting thesis.  

The conflict in the novel occurs when Marvin Macy returns to town after serving time in prison. He was briefly married to Miss Amelia, but suffice it to say, their marriage was a disaster.  

I enjoyed The Ballad of the Sad Cafe, but I have some notes on it. It’s told by a third-person omniscient narrator, and the narrative voice is very intrusive. I’m not sure if the narrative voice needed to be so intrusive—it feels very different from the third-person narrative voice in McCullers’ novels The Heart is a Lonely Hunter and The Member of the Wedding.  

The Ballad of the Sad Cafe was adapted as a play by Edward Albee in 1963, and I can understand why someone would want to adapt it to a different medium, as there is so much in the novella that goes unsaid, or could be expanded upon.  

The six short stories are a mixed bag, as short stories usually are. The first story, “Wunderkind” was my favorite, and it was McCullers’ first published short story, written when she was just seventeen years old. It shows a young writer effectively harnessing her talents. “The Sojourner” was effective, and it reminded me a lot of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s work—McCullers must have read Fitzgerald’s short story “Babylon Revisited.” The final short story in the book, “A Tree, A Rock, A Cloud,” felt like a pastiche of Thomas Wolfe’s style. Even the title was reminiscent of Wolfe’s often-repeated phrase “A stone, a leaf, a door,” which he used in his debut novel Look Homeward, Angel. Perhaps the story was meant as an affectionate tribute from one Southern writer to another.  

I’d recommend The Ballad of the Sad Cafe; it’s a story that will stick with you long after you finish reading it. 

Book Review: The Natural, by Bernard Malamud (1952)

Bernard Malamud’s 1952 novel The Natural, about baseball player Roy Hobbs and his magical bat Wonderboy, is a very different piece of art from the 1984 movie starring Robert Redford. While the movie is ultimately a heroic story of triumph and success, Malamud’s novel is a bleak satire of America.  

A friend of mine had read The Natural shortly after reading The Great Gatsby, and it struck him at the time that both novels were about the emptiness of the American Dream. I read The Natural last spring, and shortly after finishing it, I re-read The Great Gatsby, and I agree, there are definitely similarities between the two novels. I don’t know that Malamud was specifically influenced by Fitzgerald, but certainly both authors were approaching their material from a similar philosophical standpoint.  

The Natural is really a myth, a fable, a story that exists on a heightened plane of reality. That’s the charm of the novel, but it also makes it hard to relate to the characters. I never felt much affinity for the Roy Hobbs of the novel, as he is an inarticulate lunkhead.  

As a baseball fan, it’s always fun to read novels that are set in the baseball world. Although Roy Hobbs’ stunning success at baseball is unrealistic. But we are in a fable, after all. And perhaps the fable-like setting is the reason for this huge error: Malamud describes the fictional New York Knights, a National League team, playing a night game in Chicago against the Cubs. A night game at Wrigley Field in 1952? No way that could happen! As every baseball fan knows, Wrigley Field was the last major league baseball stadium to have lights—the first night game at Wrigley didn’t happen until 1988. But maybe The Natural exists in a reality where Wrigley Field added lights in the 1940’s, like every other baseball stadium.  

The Natural is a bleak novel, and it holds out little hope for heroes. Perhaps that’s the point Malamud is making—that we should not try to make our sports figures heroes or models for living. As the great pitcher Bob Gibson once said, “Why do I have to be an example for your kid? You be an example for your own kid.” Great advice. Certainly, the Roy Hobbs of the novel is not someone to emulate.  

Malamud’s novel is a fascinating look at America seen through the lens of its national pastime.  

Book Review: A Night to Remember, by Walter Lord (1955)

Walter Lord’s 1955 book A Night to Remember, about the sinking of the Titanic, is a classic about the doomed ocean liner. Lord interviewed numerous survivors and highlighted their stories in brief vignettes. At around 160 pages long, A Night to Remember is a quick and propulsive read. A Night to Remember is well-written, and Lord did a marvelous job of threading together so many different accounts and points of view.  

Lord starts the book as the fateful iceberg is sighted. The limitation of Lord’s decision to start the book at that moment is that we lose the opportunity for more scene setting. The reader can’t really differentiate very much between the characters, and there’s less of a connection to the characters, since you don’t meet them until the disaster starts. This kind of scene setting was perfected with 1970’s disaster movies, where you learn before the disaster starts who’s on the brink of getting divorced, and which adorable elderly ladies have stowed away without a ticket.  

In comparison, I just read Jonathan Mayo’s 2016 book Titanic: Minute by Minute, which begins 24 hours before Titanic hit the iceberg, so there’s plenty of time to soak up the rhythm of life on the ship before the tragedy ensues. And learn crazy little facts like the bugler played the song “The Roast Beef of Old England” in all three dining rooms to announce that meals were being served.  

Lord’s writing style is straightforward and highly readable, but A Night to Remember is quite dated in how women’s names are handled. Married women are referred to only by their husband’s name, so the unsinkable Molly Brown becomes Mrs. J.J. Brown. It’s very outdated, and honestly, the women’s names should just be updated. I know, that’s changing what the author wrote, but A Night to Remember is now 70 years old, and times change. And I’d like to know what these women’s first names were.  

Curiously, in A Night to Remember, Lord did not depict the Titanic breaking apart as it sank. (Survivors’ testimony differed on this account, but the discovery of the wreck, 30 years after Lord’s book was published, proved definitively that the ship broke apart.) Survivor Jack Thayer’s privately printed account of the sinking stated that the ship broke apart. Lord must have read Thayer’s account, so I’m not sure why Lord didn’t at least raise the possibility of the Titanic breaking apart.  

One section where A Night to Remember is very strong is Lord’s understanding of the class issues surrounding the sinking of the Titanic. He writes: “the New York American broke the news on April 16 with a lead devoted almost entirely to John Jacob Astor; at the end it mentioned that 1,800 others were also lost.” (p.91) I’m not sure who was more clueless, the New York American or the Evening Sun who ran a headline: ALL SAVED FROM TITANIC AFTER COLLISION. “The story reported all passengers transferred to the Parisian and the Carpathia, with the Titanic being towed by the Virginian to Halifax.” (p.139) If only Titanic had been so lucky.  

Lord writes: “the Titanic also marked the end of a general feeling of confidence...For 100 years the Western world had been at peace. For 100 years technology had steadily improved...Before the Titanic, all was quiet. Afterward all was tumult.” (p.95) That might be an overstatement, but it’s hard not to feel as though the sinking of the Titanic was the last gasp of the Victorian and Edwardian Age, a harbinger of the chaos that would erupt when World War I broke out in 1914. In F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1934 novel Tender Is the Night, the main character Dick Diver says while exploring a World War I battlefield, “All my beautiful lovely safe world blew itself up here with a great gust of high-explosive love.” (p.72) The post-World War I era would bring about a time of great uncertainty and many changes, as Fitzgerald chronicled in his writings.  

It’s hard to imagine future generations displaying the sangfroid of millionaire Benjamin Guggenheim, who helped numerous women and children into lifeboats, and appeared on the boat deck in full evening dress with his secretary. Guggenheim said, “We’ve dressed up in our best, and we are prepared to go down like gentlemen.” He told a steward, “If anything should happen to me, tell my wife in New York that I’ve done my best in doing my duty.” Guggenheim died in the sinking, and his body was never recovered.  

A Night to Remember is an excellent book about one of the great tragedies of the 20th century.