A haunting tale that gives meaning to the category "Southern Gothic," Carson McCullers' sophomore debut, "Reflections in a Golden Eye" is eerie, beautiful, and reverent.

A cast of characters each with their secrets and each offering a tiny glimpse into a life of another is the highlight of this book. Private Williams watches Mrs. Penderson, Mrs. Penderson secretly loves Major Langdorf, a Filipino houseboy who is the campiest of them all, and Mr. Penderson, though he cannot even identify his own latent homosexuality, struggles in the throes of all these pursuits. The darkness of this book raises a question central to McCullers' work: ought square pegs be forced into round holes just for the sake of normalcy?

Compelling drama, but oddly cold

With its short page count, "Reflections in a Golden Eye" is more of a novella than a novel. What is disappointing about it is that it takes about fifty pages (the majority of the novella) to get involved in the characters and the plot. It starts intriguingly enough, with the promise of a murder involving the central characters ("two officers, a soldier, two women, a Filipino, and a horse."), but McCullers' prose is so cold and distant that it makes the plot inaccessible to the reader. The descriptions of the setting benefit from this and become starkly beautiful -- "Then suddenly the sun was gone. There was a chill in the air and a light, pure wind. It was time for retreat. From far away came the sound of the bugle, clarified by distance and echoing in the woods with a lost hollow tone. The night was near at hand." -- but the characters are rendered so abstruse by it that it feels slightly maddening. After thirty pages someone asked me how the book was so far and the only word that came to mind was bizarre. The violence (both subtle and overt) is startling and seems too unreasoned.

But stick with it. In the last thirty pages or so you begin to comprehend the pathos of the characters and their situations, and suspense begins to build as the novella heads to its shattering climax. What McCullers is exploring is how repressed desire can turn to intense hatred, and how that loathing can turn to violence in one sudden moment. The characters are all stuck in their own traps, and most of them are being driven mad by desperation. At the center is Captain Weldon Penderton, a repressed homosexual whose desires are so internalized that the only expression they can find is rage and despair. When his colleague, and his wife's lover, remarks that another character would do better in life if he conformed to the mainstream a little more Penderton angrily disagrees, bitterly wondering "that any fulfillment obtained at the expense of normalcy is wrong, and should not be allowed to bring happiness. In short, it is better, because it is morally honorable, for the square peg to keep scraping about the round hole rather than to discover and use the unorthodox square that would fit it?" When you consider the ramifications that a life of trying to scrape into a round hole have had on him, you can't help but feel for Penderton. This becomes all the more resonant when you consider that "Reflections in a Golden Eye" was written at a time when McCullers' own marriage (to a bisexual soldier) was failing as a result of their homosexual affairs.

In the end "Reflections" is a startling and intelligent, not to mention socially important, work. I just wish that it wasn't so hard to get into in the first place, because its initial heartlessness is a misgiving. There actually is a lot of emotion and depth in this novella, and yet it is only toward the ending that it truly shines.

I read this novella for my 20th century queer project, a project where I read 100+ books by queer or trans authors, I read this for the year 1941.

Less of narrative and more of an examination of every cluster of deep, dark, human desires. McCullers is a master of tension, of horror, of a slow, creeping dread. Her work reminds me a lot of Daphne du Maurier, Patricia Highsmith, Tennessee Williams, Truman Capote and other gothic authors of that ilk. Her writing is watching you, as you read, examining you, seeing right into your soul.

I wasn’t cheering for any of the characters in this novella. I wasn’t agreeing or disagreeing with who they presented themselves to be, but I still was transfixed, unable to look away, to keep reading. Darkly humorous, sometimes loud, orchestral, other times silent and creeping, it has a way of lingering with you. Many of the characters struggle to articulate their own feelings, their own thoughts, but the author demonstrates their innermost emotions, even if the character themselves remains blind to it.

There were only a few times where I felt this novel was overwritten or too dramatic. So layered, so complex, rich like dark, peat earth, hiding a thousand secrets amongst its pages, it also managed to be … camp? Queer? Absurd?

Reflections of a Golden Eye illuminates where other books fear to tread. One I wish I could’ve read in high school, but it would’ve been far too ghastly to read as a class.

‘You mean,’ Captain Penderton said, ‘that any fulfilment obtained at the expense of normalcy is wrong, and should not be allowed to bring happiness. In short, it is better, because it is morally honourable, for the square peg to keep scraping about the round hole rather than to discover and use the unorthodox square that would fit it?
‘Why, you put it exactly right,’ the Major said. ‘Don’t you agree with me?’

tw: stalking, racial slurs, racially motivated crime about 70% of the way through, gun violence, mental illness, many trigger warnings for this one, it is dark!