The Member of the Wedding

Having read The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter a few years ago, I was eager to crack open another Carson McCullers' book. If I could find half of the raw emotion and character that enveloped McCullers' first novel, I would be content. I chose The Member of the Wedding for no reason other than

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accessibility; I happened to have a copy right in front of me. Though the book started out much too slow, lacked a good sense of pacing, and wasn't nearly as powerful as its predecessor, it was a great novel, indeed.

McCullers had this way of picking out the most awkward, socially-inept characters and making them accessible to her readers. Not only are these characters accessible, but their actions and feelings really resonate with many of us, I believe. Frankie Addams (or F. Jasmine as she prefers to be called) is one of these characters. She's strange and unsophisticated, but she believes otherwise, which leads her along a path toward great embarrassment or worse. The reader sees it coming, and because we care about the character we want her to avoid it, but because this is a McCullers story we eagerly anticipate the destruction. We know the carnage will be laid out in a way that is moving and lyrical.

In some ways The Member of the Wedding is on par with The Heart Is A Lonely Hunter —it is a wonderful character study and does not flinch in its portrayal of the human condition. In other regards, however, The Member of the Wedding doesn't have the story or the cast of secondary characters that made McCullers' debut novel unstoppable. Regardless, I look forward to the next. McCullers' name easily belongs amongst the greats of her time.

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A coming-of-age novel, of sorts, about a twelve-year old girl growing up in the American South during World War II, a girl who becomes obsessed with the idea of her brother's wedding and somehow convinces herself that when it's over, she will go off with them and into another, freer life.

Carson

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McCullers' writing style is a little odd. It is, on the surface, very plain, even unsophisticated, but at the same time it often has a strange, oblique quality to it. It takes some getting used to, but I'd already done so once, over the course of The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, which I loved. It had to win me all over again when I started this one, and that took a while, but by the end it was absolutely working for me. And McCullers does an amazing job of capturing what it's like to be at that in-between age. Not just the usual cusp-of-adolescence stuff either -- inklings about sex, a longing to escape the confines of childhood and find or make one's own place in the world -- but also the, for lack of a better phrase, existential crisis of it all. I'd almost forgotten what that's like, and it hit me with quite a shock of recognition to see it represented so well here.

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Twelve-year-old Frankie Adams is bored with life and longing for adventure, for a sense of belonging to something “bigger.” When her older brother comes home on leave from the Army, to marry his girlfriend Janice, she becomes obsessed with the wedding and what it may mean for her own future.

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Carson McCullers has a way of writing her characters that draws the reader into their very souls. Frankie’s journey through this phase of adolescence is at once painfully distressing, funny and charming. I was, in turns, afraid for Frankie and amused by her. I was – with some wincing – reminded of my own foibles at this age. That headlong rush to “grow up” to be part of an adult world that I didn’t quite understand but SOOOoo wanted to join. That in-between age when I still enjoyed the games of childhood and younger cousins, but also wanted to be accepted by the older teens and included in their dances, parties and secret societies.

I listened to the audio which I got through my library’s Overdrive connection. It is wonderfully acted by Ruby Dee, Jena Malone and Victor Mack, however, it’s an audio of the PLAY, not of the novel. I immediately picked up the text of the novel and read it through in a day.

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Frankie provides our eyes and ears for A Member of the Wedding and what a view she gives us readers! Frankie is poised on the edge of childhood and adulthood, that awful spot we now call adolescence, but she is not sitting quietly on the edge; she is teetering back and forth between the worlds and

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it is not a happy place to be. She has lost her connections to her world. There are only two who try to call her back into the world: Berenice, the housekeeper, and her cousin, John Henry. As Frankie questions the world, Berenice is the voice of the grownup world, trying to ease Frankie into the new world. At the same time, John Henry is the voice of Frankie's childhood, urging her to play, to experience the world, to forget the world of thinking. Frankie's one hope becomes her desire to escape and join her brother and his new wife after their wedding. Of course, this does not happen and Frankie goes back to her world, but she is not the same person she once was. What a rich, marvelous book! I could read it all over again and I think I would love it just as much. Frankie's encounter with the soldier...the monkey and the monkey owner...the Freaks....the noises and the pictures the author draws of this world...a rich, rich story.

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"Frankie lives in a small town in Georgia during World War II. Loneliness surrounds her. Her mother died during childbirth with her, so she has never had a mother or siblings. Her father works a lot and when he is home, he is in his own world of books and newspapers, and really doesn’t pay her

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much attention...."

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Only 163 pages, but oh! so powerful.

An absolutely lovely performance by narrator, Susan Sarandon! What a heartrending, beautifully written story of adolescent angst! Meet Frances Jasmine Adams, aka Frankie, aka F. Jasmine (pronounced Jasmeen) Adams, depending on her mood at the moment. Accompany this 12 year old girl on the

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excruciating emotional journey from childhood to the cusp of adulthood, and lose your heart to her and her cousin, John Henry, and the family cook, Berniece. Her brother's wedding is the occasion, her desire to be a member of anything rather than continue "unjoined" is her state of being, and her yearning motivates her dreams, wishes and near tragic bad choices. I felt like I was walking beside her through the entire story. Great literature!

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This is one of those books I probably should reread because I was not much older than the protagonist when I first read it. I'm sure I would get a lot more out of it now with more life experience behind me. Then again if I reread everything I shall never finish the 1000 (or really 1070) books on

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the list!

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I keep saying this, but then I keep not following my own advice: I have to stop reading books about annoying teenagers. So Frankie, the main character, was annoying, though her troubles and her lack of ability to name her affliction is certainly one that I could understand and somewhat relate to.

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McCullers really captures the unending, slow, suffocating summer in the South, where there isn't much to do but to sit around and play cards in the kitchen and talk about the same things over and over again. She also captures the indescribable urgency that Frankie feels when her brother's wedding is announced. Perhaps what McCullers does best is to name this thing a thousand different things as Frankie tries to explain it to herself and the people around her, family and strangers alike.

The book follows the pattern of Frankie's existence, starting off slow, purposeless, and idle and slowly picking up speed as Frankie feels the pressure to break free of the cage she find herself in. McCullers speaks the sensibility and frame of mind of the people in a small town during the war without explaining anything but by just letting them exist, do, and talk. Everything about the story and the characters feel organic and though there aren't any surprises, the book is ultimately heartbreaking.

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This southern fiction classic is a dreamy, hazy meandering walk through an unnamed southern town in an unnamed southern state (although I suspect it to be the author's home state of Georgia) through the eyes of an imaginative 12-year old during World War II. The characters were developed superbly

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and the use of language was creative and unexpected. With all the focus on The Help these days, it is hard not to pay attention to the characterization of Berenice, the family's black maid, and her relationship to Frankie and John Henry. These relationships were central to the story. McCullers presents Berenice with a genuineness and honesty that would have been difficult to achieve in a contemporary work of southern fiction. McCullers was writing about her times at the time and this results in less cliche and, instead, feels very real.

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This is a Southern coming-of-age story told through the eyes of a twelve-year-old who is to be in her brother's wedding and wishes to "stow away" on his honeymoon. Important characters were developed as they should have been and one gets a sense of how each relates to the main character of F.

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Jasmine. While I recognize the literary merit of the book, I felt a little dissatisfaction in the end with the overall story.

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I think McCullers is an acquired taste, like olives and mushrooms. Fortunately for me, I've acquired a taste for all three.

Our heroine, Frankie, is 12, bored, out-of-sorts, and hot in her small Southern town. All she has to look forward to during this draggingly long summer is her brother's

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wedding. And look forward to it she does!

As Frankie is a complete innocent, she believes that she not only will be a part of the wedding, but will blithely accompany her brother and his new bride on their honeymoon (and presumably for the rest of their lives).

Okay, that seems an absurd premise and that Frankie is simply a figure of fun. Not so. McCullers shows Frankie's slow awakening to things only dimly understood as she wanders around town, completely without escort or guidance. The book is divided in two parts; the second part turns quite a bit darker as this girl ventures into places where she doesn't belong, makes mistakes, and shows a fairly alarming streak of anger in her character.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book, but it's not for everyone. It's weird and McCullers' view of life is distinctly off-kilter. Still, recommended for those who enjoy Southern Gothic or the off-beat.

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A perfect portrait of what it's like to be 13. Frankie (or F. Jasmine, as she refers to herself) wants to be anywhere but where she is. Where she is is mostly in the kitchen with her young cousin John Henry and Berenice, cook and soulmate, as they while away the hot August afternoons exchanging

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stories and dreams. Frankie's brother is getting married in a week, and Frankie has decided that she will be leaving town forever with her brother and his new bride after the wedding. We join her as she takes a farewell walk around her town, where she puts herself in more peril than she realizes.

I am awed by how beautifully McCullers conveys Frankie's spirit--her sense of herself as worldly, yet her actual total and absolute naivete. Frankie's yearning to belong, to be a "member" of anything---ah--the memories McCullers evokes of being 13. A simply amazing book.

5 stars

Some quotes from the book that particularly struck me:

First sentence:

"It happened that green and crazy summer when Frankie was twelve years old. This was the summer when for a long time she had not been a member."

"Frankie had become an unjoined person...."

"'To me it is the irony of fate,' she said. 'The way they come here. Those moths could fly anywhere. Yet they keep hanging around the windows of this house.'"

"She was afraid of these things that made her suddenly wonder who she was, and what she was going to be in the world and why she was standing at that minute, seeing a light, or listening, or staring up into the sky, alone. She was afraid and there was a queer tightness in her through."

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Frankie Addams is a young, confused twelve-year-old who is frustrated because she feels so disconnected to anything in the world around her. She doesn't belong to a single “group” so when she is invited to become a “member of the wedding” of her brother Jarvis to Janice Adams she sees an

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opportunity to belong and spins a total fantasy around this concept. She makes plans throughout the weekend to accompany Jarvis and Janice on their honeymoon and then leave town and never return. Eventually Frankie makes it to her brother's wedding, which does not go the way she'd planned. Frankie is forced to realize that a marriage is a union between only two people, not three. When she is brought back home against her will, Frankie makes one final attempt to flee, and unsurprisingly, things don't exactly go her way.

The book is written in three parts. Each part portrays Frankie in a crisis at that point in the story. I thought it was very interesting that the author chose the name changes to represent different phases of Frankie's feelings. In part one she's a petulant little girl. In part two she envisions herself as F. Jasmine Addams and in part three she becomes Frances Addams, with a rich fantasy life as part of the last two. I thought this book was beautifully written and told a fascinating story filled with hope but also anxiety and sadness.

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The book, The Member of the Wedding, is a classic. It focuses on the same problems of today's YAs: the awkwardness of being an adolescence and yet the possibility of living your dreams, humiliation, rejection, and the awakening experience of growing from an adolescent to the harsh reality of being

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an adult.

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A peculiar novel that has a hot and sticky second half which is book-ended by sides that burn like cement under the noon sun, they glitter like glass.

This was an NPR recommendation that I picked up on a whim. McCullers has a really unique voice. This particular story is that of a pre-teen girl, wanting to be more (more interesting, have more friends, have a better life, anything), and creating her own reality in which the impossible could

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happen. I has really impressed with both the realism of the character, and McCullers' gift for making you understand exactly what the character is going through. It's like being eleven again.

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This book tells the story of a 12-year-old girl, Frankie, and how she spends one particular summer. “She feels alone and isolated.” “She belonged to no club and was a member of nothing in the world.”

Frankie’s mother died giving birth to her and her father is always working. She spends

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most of her time sitting in the kitchen discussing life with Berenice, the black cook with a glass blue eye, and her (Frankie’s) 5-year-old cousin, John Henry West.

Frankie’s brother, Jarvis, is going to be married and Frankie has an obsession about the wedding. She wants to accompany the couple on their honeymoon and is sure that this will happen. If not, she will shoot herself with her father’s gun.

Frankie is not a happy girl, nor this summer at any rate.

“’Us have a good time?’ Frankie asked. ‘Us?’”

“’I wish I was somebody else except me!’”

She changed her name to F. Jasmine Addams.

She was a tall girl and she had worked out that according to mathematics she would grow to be over nine feet tall. She would be a Freak. Already some of the other children hollered to her: “Is it cold up there?”

“She hated herself, and had become a loafer and a big no-good who hung around the summer kitchen: dirty and greedy and mean and sad.”

After the wedding and the honeymoon, Frankie, or F. Jasmine Addams, rather, had determined that she would not be coming back home.

Frankie, John Henry and Berenice had wonderful, philosophical, existential conversations in the kitchen.

Berenice tells them about love and her four husbands, including about Ludie, her favourite husband, and the night he died. Her last husband, Willis Rhodes , was the worst of them, so terrible that Berenice had to call the Law on him.

For want of people to apprise about the forthcoming wedding, Frankie goes for a walk about town and tells strangers about it and her participation in it. She goes into the Blue Moon and there makes the acquaintance of a soldier who apparently doesn’t realize how young she is and invites her on a date, which leads to a rather frightening occurrence.

The portrayal of Frankie and her inner and outer life is exceptional. I don’t know of any other novelist than Carson McCullers who wrote so exquisitely. Though she may have been somewhat forgotten today, she won two distinguished awards, one in 1945 and one in 1950.

If you appreciate great literature, try to get hold of this novel, which was set in the time of the Second World War. I’ve just ordered several other works by this outstanding author.

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During WW 2, 12 year old Frankie Addams lives in a small Southern town, and she is bored. Really bored. Her mother died giving birth to her, and her father is extremely distant. The other girls her age bully and ostracize her. Her only company is her six year old cousin John Henry, and the

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housekeeper Berenice Sadie Brown, a woman of color. She wishes people could shift between male and female at will; Berenice wishes everyone was the same color. Over a few days in August, Frankie experiences some harsh things that could change how she lives her life.

When the family gets word that Frankie’s older brother will be coming home to be married, and will then have a short honeymoon before returning to his military unit, Frankie fixates on that event as the one thing that will save her. Both her brother and his fiancé have first names that start with J, so Frankie adopts the name Jasmine. She starts packing, in the belief that after the wedding, they will take her with them on their honeymoon and they will all live together. Although she tells this to everyone, only Berenice bothers to tell her that won’t happen. Told to go buy a dress for the wedding, she chooses one that is totally inappropriate for her age. That leads to some adventures on its own. Then comes the wedding…

Although I sympathized with Frankie’s loneliness and frustration, I couldn’t stand how she made the wedding all about herself. I also disliked how she treated Berenice. Is she a bad child? No, she’s just ignored and left to grow up basically on her own. She’s on the verge of becoming a young woman, and no one is giving her clues on how to behave. A very well done coming of age story, but kind of hard to read, watching Frankie.

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Frankie Addams is twelve years old and living in the South with her widowed father. Berenice comes in to cook and clean and watch Frankie over the summer. Her young cousin John Henry also spends a lot of time at Frankie's house. Frankie is tall and awkward with no real friends other than Berenice

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and John Henry. Her hormones are at work and combined with her loneliness, this makes for an uncomfortable summer. The only bright light is that her brother is getting married soon, and Frankie will attend the wedding. She conceives the idea that she will leave with Jarvis and his new wife on their honeymoon and never return home again.
McCullers writes with an authentic Southern voice. The time period is the 1940s during World War II and race relations in the South are poor. This story, much like To Kill a Mockingbird, makes a point of displaying those relations. Berenice longs for a world where race is not an issue:
"First, there would be no separate colored people in the world, but all human beings would be light brown color with blue eyes and black hair. There would be no colored people and no white people to make the colored people feel cheap and sorry all through their lives. No colored people, but all human men and ladies and children as one loving family on the earth."
Most reviewers talk about this book as a coming-of-age story but Frankie annoyed me. I felt sorry for her with her loneliness and naivete, but she was also rude and unpleasant a lot of the time, striking out at everyone around her. I thought the story had more to do with racial injustice, and Frankie was more of a counterpoint to Scout. Maybe that's just the way I chose to view it since I didn't care for Frankie.

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I wish I had read this when I was 11 or 12.

was very well received in our Book Circle. There was more talk about the treatment of time than I had focused on, and that makes me think I will read it again with a more critical eye. But oh, poor Frankie, going through the private turmoil of change that is teenage years, in a particular place and

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time, without a mother to model herself toward or against, with a deep need to belong and an equally deep imagination.

Her behavior reminded me, along with a recent review of something else this week, of Goffman's The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, wherein he details the ways we act differently in different company, in different roles, etc. It was written a long time ago, but Frankie reminded me of how we consciously and unconsciously try on presentations every day, until, if we are lucky, we arrive at the set of realities that constitute our public and private personhood.

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Wow, this was even more amazing than I remembered. I think it had been over 20 years since I read it. I had read more recently HEART IS A LONELY HUNTER - and boy, I thought that I loved that; but I only loved one of the two plots of that story, whereas this was 100% amazing through and through.

I

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had to look up the year that child actress Anna Paquin starred in the TV movie version of this - 1997. I found that movie too literal, and Paquin cast too young; she was so small, and Frankie was supposed to be so tall. The scenes with the solder were VERY disturbing when played with such a small girl. That said, I'll never forget her performance in the climactic scene.

I did not recall how close to the end of the book the wedding happened - i.e. how little "happened" afterward, or rather how crammed all the "after" was into so few pages, as was the wedding itself. Which is part of the writing's power. I think McCullers is just amazing in how she brings her stories to a head, making the payoff as good as the journey, which is not a common thing in a modern novel. Usually you get a really good bunch of pages but summed up with kind of an anti-climax; or, you get a real whopper of a narrative arc and ending, but don't enjoy the journey so much. MEMBER OF THE WEDDING is flawless - maybe being relatively short at only about 150 pages is a help. Modern novels probably just go on too long.

I won't bother with much of a plot summary. Southern eccentricity, lots of mood and pictures of intimacy; 12-year-old Frankie spends the dog days of a deep-South summer in anticipation of her big brother's wedding. She's on the cusp of big change, and at times truly manic in her passions and her desire to quit town for good. There's something very powerful in stories about girls this age that always draws me in McCullers is the best..

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very moving and really ahead of its time, edgier and more challenging than heart is a lonely hunter or to kill a mockingbird, to which it's often compared. really wonderful, i'm sorry it took me this long to read it.