A review by foggy_rosamund
Clock Without Hands by Carson McCullers

2.0

Set at just before the end of segregation in the American South, this novel follows the interconnecting lives of four men in a small town. JT Malone, a white pharmacist, who is dying of leukemia, The Judge, an elderly racist lawyer and former congressman, his grandson, Jester, a white liberal, and Sherman, an intelligent, disaffected Black orphan. All these characters are unpleasant, unhappy men, the Judge most of all, and throughout I struggled to see what McCullers was trying to do with them. There are moments that remind of what I loved about other novels of hers, but overall I struggled to see what held this book together, and what McCullers was trying to show us. The characterisations are well fleshed out, but the story doesn't work.