[Clock Without Hands] probes intensely the human spirit, yet captures indelibly the sights and the sounds, the sorrow and the tensions of the South [Mrs. McCullers] knows so well. Incisively exploring the minds and the motivations, the yearnings and dreams of the young, it at the same time conveys the longing and frustration, the sense of intruding death, of the old….

[Mrs. McCullers'] talent, the dreamlike—almost trancelike—quality of her fiction seemingly precludes her ever being completely uninteresting. Yet, somehow, the reader occasionally finds himself looking for something that is not there. Perhaps it is merely a sense that Mrs. McCullers has seldom permitted her characters to go the whole way, to achieve any final or satisfactory vision of the consequence of their actions. There are, perhaps, too many violent endings; too many questions which are averted by death. And, while it would be wrong to accuse...