I read Reflections in bus stops, busses, malls, and movie theaters in Nashville. I thanks Carson McCullers for this little gem, which enriched my life for a brief moment in the vast desert of car parking lots and needless and scary commercial enterprises. I thought often about what she would think of the South now.

I read the last part of Reflections in the movie theater as I was being blasted with some preview stuff about upcoming films. Guns, space, bombs, armies, things blowing up, murders, blood... It was nice to have Reflections neatly and snugly spread out on my lap and McCullers' narration calmly describe a very alien life, one that was calm, boring, subtle, simple, yet intricately complicated, repressed, and ultimately violent. Then I read the afterword, where Williams defends the Gothic, defends the gruesome and "awful" things McCullers writes about. And it occurred to me, with renewed surprise, that we have come so far in how much awfulness and violence we assume and expect not only from life but from arts and entertainment. But despite the blood and gore in the film previews, the uneventful murder (which McCullers tells us about in the first paragraph of the book) seems so chilling. It touches something so fundamental. And that's what makes this book special.

Unlike most people, I liked Reflections better than Member of the Wedding. Heart is a Lonely Hunter is certainly my favorite, though. It is hard to compare the two, as I think Reflections is entirely different from Heart. Reflections is meant to be short and minimalist, almost like a snapshot. Heart is a Lonely Hunter is a philosophy, a study of a whole era and peoples. McCullers' voice is clear in both of them, and it's the only thing that I can really see that's similar.