PS: Flannery O'Connor

With Flannery O'Connor: you love her work, or hate it, but likely both. If you're looking to read something pleasant, something uplifting, which shows the human spirit at its best, DO NOT read O'Connor. Her vision is dark, and mired in Catholic theology and her adamant belief in the necessity of suffering and the difficulties of redemption. Many characters violently reject salvation, and flee through life trying to perfect their badness. Others are so bubbled-up in the thin soap of self-satisfaction, so certain of moral and social superiority, that they wouldn't know about Christian grace unless it hit 'em upside the head (which literally happens in one story.)

O'Connor's People don't connect. Some literally have no family left, and have no one to turn to. Highly educated children are alienated from uneducated mothers who worked hard to given them that education [see: "Everything That Rises Must Converge"]. Ingratitude is a given in this degenerate world [see: "Greenleaf," and, if you've got a strong gut, "A View of the Woods"]. O'Connor bitterly criticizes what she believes to be the moral and emotional emptiness of intellectuals [see: "Greenleaf"]; school teachers [see: The Violent Bear it Away, Ch. 1]; and social workers [see: "The Lame Shall Enter First"]. Characters are painfully alone, some by choice [see: Wise Blood], others by social incompetence [see: Wise Blood again]. Often that aloneness is not penetrated by others' love, or compassion for fellow sufferers [see: "The Life You Save May Be Your Own"]. It's a brutal world.

And I love O'Connor's stories. She writes about matters of life and death; so much is at stake in every story. The suspense might kill you (almost certainly someone's gonna get killed). O'Connor pushes her characters to the edge of Hell to see who they really are because action, not words, determines integrity [see: "Revelation"]. O'Connor has a brilliant ear for dialogue. She understands that people often speak without reflection, and yet, much of what they say is false. Either they're deluding themselves, or trying to delude others, or all of the above. Clearly, speech is a political tool; words are manipulated to manipulate others. Which brings up THE REASON I LOVE O'CONNOR MOST OF ALL: she shows how some people (particularly the older female characters) may act as though there is no filter between their thoughts and their words ("after a thought enters my head, why, it simply must leave my mouth") AND YET their words also suggest they plot and carefully lay down each statement as if laying down pieces on a chessboard [see: "A Good Man is Hard to Find"]. O'Connor paid attention to what people in her communities (intellectual and residential) said and did, and with unflinching honesty, presents that clarity. Yes, the situations are unrealistically grotesque, but the characters are all too real. We'd never want these people as friends, for sure. But O'Connor captures how many (certainly not all) "Good Country People" from the post-reconstruction South weren't all that good.

SPOILER ALERT: Joyce Carol Oates reviews O'Connor

Check out interesting essay from the New York Review of Books, by super-prolific fiction writer Joyce Carol Oates.

Included are words of wisdom from Flannery herself:

Writers who see by the light of their Christian faith will have, in these times, the sharpest eye for the grotesque, for the perverse, and for the unacceptable.... To the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures.—Flannery O'Connor, "The Fiction Writer and His Country"

Whenever I'm asked why Southern writers particularly have a penchant for writing about freaks, I say it is because we are still able to recognize one.
—Flannery O'Connor, "Some Aspects of the Grotesque in Southern Fiction"