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...