I’m sorry to report that this novel is pretty much a complete disaster. It’s a study of four characters located in Milan, Georgia, at the point in the early 1950s when the civil rights movement was beginning to make itself felt in the American South. We have JT Malone, a pharmacist; Judge Clane, an 85 year old ex-congressman; Jester Clane, his 17 year old orphaned grandson; and Sherman Pew, an 18 year old black guy with blue eyes. The whole thing is painful. I’m sure there is a great novel out there with the black struggle in the South as its setting, which I have yet to come across. Clock Without Hands is almost a What Not To Do guide for prospective authors. Maybe it’s because I’m English and not from that period, but so many incidents and conversations grated. Either they were artificial, or just frankly incredible. The Judge is a racist old windbag, a glutton and a vulgar sentimentalist. A great wedge of this novel is him whinging and whining and pontificating and boring (always boring) on and on about whatever he feels like for a page or so, yakking one of the other three into the ground about plans to revive Confederate money or why his wife was the best of all wives or collard greens or why races should not be educated together – that kind of stuff. Another wedge is our author describing the Judge in all his smug horribleness. So this is just tedious and mildly distressing for the reader but nothing too tough. But then we get to Sherman Pew. He’s a black youth with BLUE EYES – this is mentioned about three times per page – and he comes across like an early version of the butler in The Fresh Prince of Bel Air. Was there ever such a hoity-toity young black guy from the South in the 1950s as Sherman Pew? I quote:“The end tables are genuine antique as you can see.”“I’m just telling you I hear every teeniest vibration in the whole diatonic scale from here.”“I vibrate with every injustice that is done to my race.”I would suggest that at the very least this character is unlikely and most of the time I was thinking he was frankly bloody ridiculous. The racist old Judge takes a great liking to Sherman and hires him as an “amanuensis” and sets him to reading Great Poetry and pouring gin and tonics and lunching on caviar. The judge loves him and they have these insane conversations, a lot of which read like maybe Carson thought she was being funny. The pompous old fart and the pompous young fart, how droll. And the old one is a racist but still loves the young one who’s black. Tres amusante. Or not. So I couldn’t believe in Sherman Pew for one tiny second, which kind of blew a hole in all the criss-crossing motivations and back-story and what-all. I couldn’t believe the old Judge would talk to him as if he was an educated equal, and I couldn’t believe the grandson Jester would do likewise and freely associate with him without apparently incurring any social consequences. It was like a make-believe world with jaggy bits of occasional race-hate violent reality thrown randomly around to confuse me. As for the 4th character, JT Malone – he’s diagnosed with terminal leukemia on page two and spends the novel mooching around in a pit of black gloom, as well he might. He seems to belong to a completely different story. I suspect CM had bits of stories hanging about which she didn’t want to throw away and so stirred them into her novels in the hope they’d make a kind of sense. Not much of a review, really, which in this case is only appropriate.
Carson McCullers writes another gut-wrenching story, but in a very different vein from other sad girl misfit stories of hers that I've read. Clock Without Hands dealt with the latent racism and violence that permeates the south along with themes of parenthood--fathers, father figures, and orphans' dreams of their unknown parents. The book follows J.T. Malone, a pharmacist who has just discovered he had leukemia, his friend Judge Clane, a supremacist, out of touch fogey, Jester, Judge's grandson who hates his grandfather, and Sherman, Judge's black "amanuensis." I thought this book did a great job of detailing the complexities between men's relationships. The relationship between Jester and Sherman I read as super homoerotic. I'm not sure if McCullers intended it to be that way, but that would be pretty forward thinking and shocking for the time. I think I was picking up on a Brokeback Mountain dynamic in this lust-hate relationship. The Judge's relationships were the most interesting. He mourns his dead wife and son the entire book, oscillating between extreme love and admiration and disdain and shame over his son's suicide. Later it turns out the son pulled an Atticus Finch in his courtroom, completely going against his father's political and social views, which he pontificated upon loudly. Jester hates his grandfather, who seems simply bewildered about why he isn't more like his father. Then, there is Malone, who takes a back seat in much of the action. In the course of his six months to live, he becomes embittered that he never became a doctor (because of all those Jews who took up the medical school spots), resents his wife and kids for holding him back, and in the end does one truly good thing. Lastly, there is Sherman. He was a really fascinating character, kind of foolhardy in a very dangerous way for a young black man in Georgia in 1961. After being introduced to and falling in love with the Judge's bougie world of hot toddies and amanuensises (sp?), he finally can't take the blatant reactionary hate speech the Judge is dictating (Southern whites should be reimbursed for their slaves), he dramatically quits, kills his boss's dog and rebelliously buys property in a white neighborhood. It ended horrifically for him, as you can imagine (which is where Malone comes in, I won't spoil it. Regardless, it didn't work.) I thought his lineage was a bit far-fetched in a deus ex machina kind of way, but made for a very neat literary package. (Again, I won't spoil it, because Mom and Sophie you should definitely read this!)Now that I think about it, I really loved this book! I wish I had read it in a college class, I would have loved to have written a paper on fatherhood and paternity. Also, this book underlines just how delicate the white male psyche is. The SLIGHTEST hint of upward mobility by blacks, women, foreigners, etc. sends them into a goddamn TAILSPIN.
What do You think about Clock Without Hands (1998)?
Death is always the same, but each man dies in his own way. For J.T. Malone it began in such a simple ordinary way that for a time he confused the end of his life with the beginning of a new season.The opening sentence sets the stage for Carson McCullers' fifth and final novel, which is set in the small town of Milan in south Georgia in the mid 1950s, as the civil rights movement is in its infancy. The story revolves around the lives of four men: J.T. Malone, a respected pharmacist whose comfortable but unsatisfying life is shattered by the death sentence he receives; Judge Fox Clane, a former US Congressman and local judge whose corpulence is outweighed only by his massive ego and staunch desire to see the old Confederate states return to their antebellum glory; his grandson Jester Clane, a sensitive and misunderstood teenager who benefits from but is heavily weighed down by white privilege and his deep sense of equality toward the blacks in town and across the country; and Sherman Pew, a cocky but insecure and wounded young black man with blue eyes and an uncertain background, who works for the judge as a personal secretary and has a troubled and acrimonious relationship with Jester, who attempts repeatedly to befriend Sherman but is often met with the most acerbic comments in return. In addition to these four men, the judge's son Johnny, Jester's father, is a ghost whose premature death affects his father and son deeply.Death is an ever present theme and metaphor for this novel, along with personal choice and responsibility, on an individual basis and for the Southern way of life in the face of increasing pressure from the federal government for fair treatment of the region's black citizens. The black population in Milan is chronically oppressed by segregated housing and schools, low wages that keep them in deep poverty, and threats of injury or death if they showed up at polling centers to vote or even expressed a willingness to do so. Meanwhile, the whites live mainly in fear of their black neighbors, particularly the older residents, and they strike back with vicious fury whenever any of them steps out of line.Each of the main characters experiences his own personal crisis and mortality, as their intertwined yet intensely lonely lives in the tense and steamy town suffocate them like mice caught in a small box that is slowly filling with water. A fateful decision by one character ultimately leads to his downfall, as the others are left to suffer their own failures and miseries.Clock Without Hands is a powerful and beautifully written novel about the Deep South in the beginning of the end of the Jim Crow era, with well drawn and unforgettable main characters in a richly portrayed background. The novel ended in a rather abrupt and unsatisfying fashion for this reader, especially in comparison to her brilliant debut novel The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, but I thoroughly enjoyed this book and would highly recommend it to everyone.
—Darryl
Clock Without Hands by Carson McCullers is a story about four main characters who live in a small southern town. The story is set during segregation and before the signing into law of Brown v. The Board of Education. The story can be explained through these four characters, J. S. Malone, age forty and owner of a pharmacy, Judge Clane, the town's leading citizen, Jester, the Judge's grandson, who finds his life frighteningly empty, and Sherman Pew the negro boy with blue eyes. I think that this book is a good look into the every day lives and thoughts of these southerners at this time. The writing style is very simple and easily read. I purchased this book at a book sale at work and enjoyed the story.
—Laura
Published in 1961, this is McCullers’ final novel. She died aged 50 in 1967, leaving an unfinished autobiography.Clock without hands is a novel about death. It starts with Malone the chemist being told he is dying. Malone goes to visit his friend the Judge, a comic, corpulent Republican former senator in his eighties who drinks and pontificates on his own greatness, while fearing death and mourning his son, dead of suicide in his twenties. Most of the novel is concerned with the Judge, his grandson Jester and his amanuensis, Sherman the African-American with blue eyes.McCullers is brilliant in being both humorous and profound. The Judge is a glorious character, so hilarious in his arrogance, in his grand scheme to re-validate Confederate currency (he has millions stored in the attic).-- Nathan, Perth Australia, 2007
—Michael Dobson
