The limits of McCullers's accomplishments are real. One reads through her works with a sharp sense of the highly individual, almost eccentric nature of her achievement, but also with a growing sense of their author's restricted range of interest and abilities. And when one looks closely at the whole course of her career, one is even more struck by its disappointments and unfulfilled promises. For there is something initially inspiring but eventually dispiriting about McCullers's life as a writer. It is almost as if the disappointment felt by the would-be wunderkind of her first published story were a prophesy for her own career. (pp. 122-23)

Her fiction does not grow out of a broadening intellectual inquiry into new areas of though and experience. Rather it is limited to the repeated exploration of one idea or emotional state—the human being in isolation. Though her first and last novels...