The Heart is a Lonely Hunter

If I had to describe this book, it would be To Kill a Mockingbird if Atticus Finch was a raging-alcoholic communist. I have no bones with the writing: nice, abrupt prose and skillful character sketches, if sometimes the pacing was a bit repetitious and slow.
But dear God, I finished the book and my only thought was how much time I'd wasted on it. The theme? Uh, don't try to be smart if you're poor and live in the South, I guess? Yeahhh, and that was about it.
I wanted to like the characters, like, any of them. But I couldn't. Horrible things happened to them and I didn't care. I WANTED TO! I PROMISE! I felt like McCullers tries to make them so three-dimensional that they ended up like caricatures. What could have been a strongly empathetic portrait of those looking for education in a backward society kept me at a distance where all I could see was how faintly ridiculous their pretensions were.
McCullers and Harper both looked at the small Southern town, but where McCullers only saw the grime and backwardness of the townspeople, Harper saw hope in the individuals.