Books: The Member of the Funeral

CLOCK WITHOUT HANDS (241 pp.) —Carson McCullers—Houghton Mifflin ($4).

Violence colors the surface of Southern writing, but its core is a sense of violation. In Southern historical memory, the great act of violation was. of course, the Civil War and its aftermath. Put as baldly and inartistically as Margaret Mitchell put it, the lament of the South in Gone With the Wind was: a rape—of a people as well as a person—is a rape. Among greatly talented Southern writers, the theme of violation is indirectly stated but pervades the whole texture of life. In

Faulkner,...