THE GREY PLANE

Reviewed by Andrew J Jepsen

McCullers is one of those authors whose prose seems strangely genderless, neither quite masculine nor feminine, who is neither ostentatious or austere and many of these stories are actually vignettes and brief character sketches where nothing much happens. In fact, some of these ’stories’ (McCullers may have been at the forefront of the Fast Fiction movement and never even known it) remind me of John Cheever – the same frankness, the same sorrow, the same pointlessness. An old Jew rides on a bus with a young hick who talks to him, before getting off the bus, no different than before. Some kids make a model airplane that doesn’t fly. A boy walks into a dinner and an old man tells him how love works. These are folk tales of the real sense – real people, real events that don’t signify if they don’t signify.

However, the gems of this book are the two longer pieces – The Ballad of the Sad Cafe and The Member of the Wedding. The Ballad of the Sad Cafe had strong characters and a folksy twang of a fabricator sitting by the fire and telling you the <i>real</i> story behind this town. It’s a fun story with all the exaggerations and hopelessness you would expect from a southern writer discussing how love works within a community regardless of its reciprocation, and the dreadful beauty and power of emotions. You expect every paragraph to begin with “Whell, it was the hottest summah we’d evah seen and the corn was popping itself in Old Smith’s farmyard when Josie first came to town with a suitcase made of purple leathah like sunset over the Louisiana itself ayup.” But in a good way.

Where McCullers truly shines, however, is “The Member of the Wedding.” An examination of expectations, loneliness and rage in a young girl’s mind in the south, the novella spins several threads around sexuality, race, love and most of all, a dreadful restlessness. McCullers deftly inhabits the twelve-year-old mind of Frankie Addams, straddling the age between childhood and adulthood. But what is perhaps the strength of the book is that McCullers’ resisted the standard navelgazing that often epitomizes this type of novel. Frankie is looking out as much as looking in, which lets this book be far more than a coming of age story about flowering pear trees, and allows the story to encompass politics, gender studies, identity and, since this is a McCullers story, the very nature of love and fetish.