The Ballad of the Sad Café McCullers, Carson | Lawrence Graver (essay date 1969)
Lawrence Graver (essay date 1969)
SOURCE: Carson McCullers, University of Minnesota Press, 1969, pp. 24-33.
[In the following excerpt, Graver argues that The Ballad of the Sad Café is McCullers's best work of "grotesque" fiction. He concludes, however, that this novella is not quite as fully realized as The Member of the Wedding.]
The Ballad of the Sad Café is a good deal more rewarding [than Reflections in a Golden Eye]. Instead of trying to compete with writers of much greater psychological awareness and architechtonic skill, Mrs. McCullers here wisely moves in a limited area more suited to her talents—the alien, elemental world of legend and romance. Like all good ballads, her story is urgent, atmospheric, and primitive, and yet, in its melodramatic swiftness and simplicity, tells us more things memorable about human life than all the devious sophisticated posturings of Reflections in a Golden...
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