With greater complexity and greater realism, although perhaps with less art [than J. D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye], Carson McCullers embodies [the] same problems of adolescence, and its confrontation of the evils of experience, in her novels The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter and The Member of the Wedding. The latter more resembles The Catcher in the Rye, in that it focuses on the failure of the adolescent to adjust to the confusions of the adult world. But The Heart … is a larger and richer book. (pp. 63-4)

[The disturbed adolescent in The Member of the Wedding], Frankie Addams, embodies in exaggeraged form all those traits of immaturity which other novels have described more normally, and thereby rivets our attention on them the more firmly. Frankie's feeling of desperate isolation and alienation drives her to identify herself with her older brother and his fiancée, until she tries to join them even on their honeymoon. But this grotesque situation merely emphasizes the confusion of all adolescents, and of all maladjusted members of human society.

What raises The Member of the Wedding above the merely grotesque (as described in the author's other novel Reflections in a Golden Eye) is its inclusion of other characters suggesting the parallel tragedies of other alienated people. Berenice Sadie Brown, the Negro mammy whose husband has died leaving her lonely, and her foster-brother "Honey," who runs afoul of the law, suggest the tragedy of Negroes who can never become full "members" of society; the young John Henry is the "gentle boy" who is too good for this world; while over all hangs the cloud of the atom bomb, which everyone discusses casually.

By contrast, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter seems hardly to describe adolescence at all. The youthful Mick Kelly appears a background figure, observing and partly sharing the tragedies of the deaf-mutes, the Negroes, and the labor agitators…. [Essentially] it describes the struggle of all these lonely people to come to terms with their world, to become members of their society, to find human love—in short, to become mature. (p. 64)