What is the author's style in The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers?

The idea of the grotesque has run throughout American literature, through the works of Melville, Hawthorne and Poe, and may in fact have to do with the democratic political system, which emphasizes the individual over the collective. In twentieth- century literature, it is usually associated with Southern writers such as William Faulkner and Flannery O'Connor. Put simply, "grotesque" refers to work that portrays characters who each have an exaggerated trait or characteristic, which is used to symbolize their entire personality.