Flannery O'Connor Books

Anne Panning explores American life from all points of view: estranged tourist, new widow, an ovulating hopeful, budding entrepreneur, a college-aged victim of his broken family. It is not only the American life that Panning divulges, but the tiny tragedies and tiny victories of life itself. It is a refreshing read. Her characters are real, but in strange situations: riding in a car with a mini-horse and a lemur, frog-leg hunting with husband and sister. There is a real sense of displacement and loneliness, but not without the naturally-occuring humor that comes with life. It wasn't just the interesting props that kept me reading, it was the emotion. In a word: poignant!

Here is a worthy heir to the Borgesian ideal of the elliptical, tantalizing narrative that unwinds along unexpected paths to achieve sometimes shocking, sometimes unbalancing, always breathtaking conclusions. I read these stories in sequence, each one building on the previous one, until together they achieved a tapestry of mystery and wonder. While La Salle clearly wants to follow Borges's tracks, he manages at the same time to create a personal, naturalistic springboard that surprises the reader with a uniquely contemporary vision. In the process, La Salle unleashes a torrent of language and imagery that builds with an almost symphonic power. This is the short story unfettered from formulas, in a voice that invites the reader to shed notions of comfort and expectation in order to enter a more perfect disorder -- a driven narrative that flirts with chaos, but delivers in the end a gentle, graceful landing.

When I was researching my thesis at Vanderbilt on O'Connor, Thomas Daniel Young, my advisor, recommended this book as the best book on O'Connor, and I can think of no better authority than Dr. Young. It was invaluable to my understanding of her work.

This was my first introduction to O'Connor's work. Had I known how thoeoughly I would enjoy, I would have read her years ago. I grew up in the South and always thought I got a pretty good education. But I was never introduced to Flannery O'Connor's work. From the dark and stark nature of her unique characters, I suppose I can see why she might have been excluded. Her work shines a bright light on the flaws and foibles that make us human. She does not show the lovely views of gentle Southern living with mint julips on the veranda. She shows the frustrated rednecks and misfits of rural life. A truly excellent read.

Thomas Merton said of O'Connor that when he thought of her, he did not think of her in terms of her peers in contemporary fiction (i.e., Hemingway, Faulkner, Steinbeck) but rather, he thought of Sophocles or Aeschylus.

This compendium more than validates Merton's assessment -- after the American Empire passes, O'Connor's achievement will remain as its literary zenith. It's doubly strange, too, both for the form in which she specialized, and the content of the works. Americans (always poor judges of their own culture's worth) normally speak in terms of "The Great American Novel" --"The Naked and the Dead," "Ravelstein," "Moby Dick," "The Great Gatsby," even newcomers like "The Bonfire of the Vanities, ", "The Corrections" and "Infinite Jest" are mentioned as contenders for the title. And the content of most candidates for anything "great" or "American" must always involve wealth, splendor, orgiastic sex or consumption of some kind. O'Connor's characters, for all their supposed grotesquerie, are far less exaggerated or caricatured than any others in American fiction.

Furthermore, unlike the other authors mentioned above -- particularly unlike Tom Wolfe -- she was never in search of the "thousand-footed beast," that all-consuming rig veda of a novel. And yet, in her own, simple, steady way, she outpaces the Mailers and Franzens and their febrile journalism. O'Connor is the consummate artist craftsman, who sees her art for what it truly is -- "reason in making" -- who finds reason in the created world, and informs her creations with a parallel, answering reason. Her mental eye is unwavering, like the beam of a lighthouse -- it is always pointed at truth.

For that reason, O'Connor will probably never have the same popularity in this land of artifice and subterfuge that those others listed above will enjoy. History, nonetheless, will give her the laurels.

One does not read Flannery O' Connor for feel good endings. The characters feel incredibly real, in that their innate psychology is so easy to realte to. Whether it be the old man who lives vicariously through his granddaughter and tries to shape her to be just like him to the proud intellectual who gets outmaneuvered by a crooked Bible salesman, it's disturbing in the fact that you've felt some of the same feelings as some of the despicable people that populate her short stories.

The prose is incredible, and vividly shows that South in a time of rampant racism as well as transition to a more technological age. If there was one complaint, it would probably be that almost all of her stories have a tragic ending, and becomes a little predictable after a while. I consider myself pretty jaded, but a lot of the time it was cynicism for cynicism's sake, even if the underlying message spoke something all too true.

I suppose Flannery O'Connor has her own genre, and the reader gets it aplenty in The Complete Short Stories of Flannery O'Connor (550 pages of it). Even if you do not share her version of Thomistic philosophy, or care too much for the unique American southern fixation with exaggerated characterization, there is much to enjoy here. Some stories, like the heavily anthologized A Good Man is Hard to Find, is heavy handed and obvious. It is the less known stories where the punch is packed, like Enoch and the Gorilla and The Displaced Person. O'Connor has an uncanny way of making the obvious and banal evil; she takes the Catholic fixation on the fall of humanity and its need of redemption seriously, and in this collection the state of this state is unusual, exotic, page turning.

"Grace changes us, and change is painful."

O'Connor, a delicate Southern Catholic who lived a third of her life ravaged by lupus, was certainly acquainted with pain. Her stories reveal this much. Many readers and reviewers may wonder if she doesn't take a bit of artistic license with her definition of "grace," though. Considering her religious ideologies (which aren't hard to figure out, even after reading just one of these deliciously dark little tales), her unsubtle brutality isn't so unexpected. Look God directly in the face, the Bible says, and it completely and utterly destroys you.

It's safe to say that even if her characters don't always get an unobstructed view of their Creator, they all at least catch a glimpse. O'Connor is not shy about her beliefs, and in fact, her unswerving social sensibilities are part of what make her writing so delectable. Read closely, because every single detail is important and potent. And just like the Bible she adheres to so fervently, the endings to her stories are forecasted unapologetically by every word that comes before them.

This in no way ruins the power of those conclusions. Read a hundred interviews with a hundred writers, and I guarantee you that many of them will mention, as inspiration, "A Good Man Is Hard To Find." Sit down for twenty minutes with the hilarious and heart-breaking "River," and ask yourself if your foreknowledge didn't rob the final lines of their shuddering ferocity. Visit "A Displaced Person," meet "Enoch and the Gorilla," stay for awhile with "Greenleaf," and take a good long look at "A View of the Woods." You may find yourself wondering if there is any compassion and hope in O'Connor's world, but you'll never doubt that it is full of meaning, full of necessity, and full of heavenly fire.

There's a legitimate beef some may have with this collection. "O'Connor has written an amazing story," one of my friends once said. "I just don't know why she chose to write it thirty-one times." It's fair to say that O'Connor doesn't stray much from her predictably gruesome formula. But while her themes never change much (purification through fire, self-knowledge gained via self-destruction, and the immolations brought on by racism and doubt), her telling of them is so fine and so stark, the details themselves are what really showcase her writing's true brilliance and beauty.

This collection is arranged in chronological order, and it is part of the treat to see her ideas age as she does. Her final story, the aptly titled "Judgement Day" is a revision of her first story, "The Geranium." The differences between the two show most openly where O'Connor hides the hope and faith and love that many feel is missing from all the works between. O'Connor, like the God in which she believed, seems too ready to expose her characters to an amazing amount of pain and degredation. But if you look close enough, if you read every sentence carefully, you'll see that she makes necessary every sacrifice, every drop of blood, every harsh, scalding ray of sun. In an era now where authors tend to shock for shock's sake, O'Connor stands out as a timeless reminder that as senseless and vicious as life's stories may sometimes seem, there is still the chance that behind it all lies a deeper, knowable truth. That truth may come at some great costs, but, O'Connor seems to say, it is better to buy with your flesh something lasting and real, than to sell your soul for even a whole world of lies.

I enjoy a lot of Irish writers and even though I have known the name Flannery O'Connor for a long time,this is the first time I have actually read this author. I ,like others ,assumed Flannery was a man and Irish.Before reading this novel,I checked the Amazon customer reviews and was completely surprised . Then, with some research on the net, that Flannery was a young woman of only 27 when she wrote this book,and rather than being Irish,was from an Old Deep South Catholic family,born in Savannah,Georgia. She was born in 1925,surrounded by poor whites in a Protestant area,left home at 18,graduated from college,wrote mainly Southern Gothic short stories,only 2 novels.She had a great interest in domestic birds,peacocks,pheasants,swans,geese,chickens and Moscovy Ducks. After college she lived on a family farm with her mother,outside Millidville Georgia.She was also a good painter. She was quite frail,never married,like her father,she contacted Lupus and died very young at only 39,in 1964. Her mother outlived her for many years. It is still possible to visit the farm in Millidville,Ga.She had a deep and knowledgeable faith.
As I read this book ,I was continually reminded of other writers such as James Joyce,Erskine Caldwell,Faulkner,Erskine Caldwell,Steinbeck and even some of those bible -thumping movies such as Elmer Gantry.
This is all about having or not having faith. O'Connor understands the difference between Faith and Religion and shows what a difficult thing it can be when someone lacks real faith and attempts to develop one's own through rationalization.Flannery does not make any attempt to preach or conince the reader one way or the other about faith,but she does an admiral job of showing how difficult and all encompassing it can be for some people who have doubts and try to resolve them.
While Flannery's life was all too short ;and we are all the poorer for that;she is remembered by words like these;

"Everything that rises must converge."

"Grace changes us and change is painful."

I read a lot of books and am fond of many Southern authors, including the late Ms. O'Connor. I really enjoyed her wonderfully titled "A Hard Man is a Good Find" (Note: A fine birthday gift for my grumbling gorilla of a wife; inscription: "I told you so!") and I like the author's ability to make the grotesque humorous.
Unfortunately, this novel is a complete failure with very little to laugh about. It's a pretty meaningless story with virtually no plot: nutty war veteran returns to empty home town, goes to another town, preaches nonsense, acts like the nutjob he is, meets some other worthless characters, does nutty things in an effort to find redemption (an idiot's path, mind you), etc. This supposedly funny novel with a point (often my very favorite genre) fails to elicit more than a single laugh (the scene with the Gonga the Gorilla was pretty darn funny--pointless, but funny) and the point about redemptive suffering (if that was even the point) struck this reader as ridiculously rendered.
All the characters are lunatics and there's absolutely nothing driving this book to conclusion, other than the turn of the page. This novel has been highly recommended by people who tend to be trustworthy. Unfortunately, I put it on the short list of books I've actually finished that I wish I'd never started. Not her best effort and one of the worst novels I've ever read. HHD>.

Flannery O'Connor's Wise Blood has sometimes been described as dark comedy, sometimes simply as satire. Whichever description I eventually decide suits it best, this grotesque 1952 first novel is so disturbing that its characters and their fates will stay with me for a long time.

Haze Motes, recently released from the army after suffering a wound in Korea, returns to his home state of Tennessee where he finds himself, much to his irritation, taken for a preacher by many of the strangers whom he meets. This is an easy mistake to make since Motes has recently exchanged his uniform for the type of suit and hat commonly worn by preachers of the time and the fact that he carries himself like, and has many of the mannerisms and attitudes of, his grandfather, a onetime country preacher himself. But Motes is angered by the very idea of being mistaken for a preacher because he is repelled by the whole concept of Christianity.

After encountering a street preacher, and being disgusted by what he saw and heard, Hazel Motes founds his Church Without Christ, a church based on realism, one in which the blind do not see, the deaf do not hear, the lame do not walk, and the dead remain dead. Not too surprisingly, Haze's message attracts to him the kind of people who either become obsessed with his message or want to turn the Church Without Christ into a vehicle to put easy money into their pockets. There are Enoch Emery, an 18-year old so lonely in the big city that he sees the new church and its preacher as essential to his survival, Sabbath Lily a 15-year old abandoned by her charlatan preacher father, Asa Hawkes, and who sets out to seduce Motes, Hoover Shoates who hires his own false prophet and starts a rival church, and the landlady who decides to marry Motes in order to share his monthly government check.

Flannery O'Connor's writing seldom, if ever, provides the reader with anything like a "happy ending" and Wise Blood, her first novel, is no exception. It is filled with characters who focus exclusively on self-gratification and who are not the least concerned about what they have to say or do in order to get what they want from those who have it. Even the minor characters, in particular the police, are not to be trusted as Motes so painfully discovers near the end of the book. But along the way, O'Connor provides memorable scenes that reflect her sense of humor and irony. I won't soon forget the images of the small, newspaper-wrapped mummy being rapidly carried through the rainy streets after being stolen from a museum nor the man in the gorilla suit who terrified the couple in the woods with whom he only wanted to shake hands.

This review is for the Farrar, Straus and Giroux paperback edition, 1967. WISE BLOOD, first published in 1952, was Flannery O'Connor's debut novel.

The story opens with Hazel Motes, recently discharged from the Army, on the train to the fictional town of Taulkinham, Tennessee, where he's "...going to do some things I never have done before." Haze is not from Taulkinham, apparently has never been there. "But you might as well go one place as another," he says to a talkative passenger, and then adds without provocation, "I reckon you think you been redeemed."

Haze has a problem with redemption. He is haunted by the "ragged figure" of Christ "who moves from tree to tree in the back of his mind." On the street corners of Taulkinham, he preaches the Church of Christ without Christ, but attracts no followers other than Enoch Emery, an unlikely apostle and Onnie Jay Holy, a con man who usurps Haze's idea. Haze can't even convert himself. Instead, he relents to his compulsive interest in Asa Hawks, a competitive preacher who claims to have blinded himself, and Asa's fifteen year old daughter.

The author considers her work a comic novel about a person whose belief in Christ is a matter of life and death. I found it a dark story about confused characters from someone else's nightmare.

This novel combines startling images and an inscrutable Old Testament sensibility with funny scenes that will make you laugh out loud. It is the novel that helped cement Flannery O'Connor's literary reputation. She's a writer who will be part of the canon in a hundred years -- people will still be reading and discussing her. "Wise Blood" is the story of Hazel Motes, a man determine to strip Christ out of his life and out of the world, but, who, paradoxically, is also obsessed with Him. A walk through a haunted yet still good world filled with men who are made into monkeys, workaday street preachers, broke down autos, this is a kaleidoscope of sense, doubts, guilt, and humor: a must read tour de force.

I bought this book because I am a devotee of Flannery O'Connor, and I have read and been enchanted by both Merton's and Day's autobiographies. The author's approach to the lives of these four Catholic writers is unique and seems at first to be somewhat of a stretch. The connections between most of them are tenuous at best - Merton and Day had a long-running correspondence, but O'Connor only was only ever in direct contact with Percy, for instance. However, the connections they made during their lives, though interesting, are not really the point of this book. What the four really had in common was their writing, religion, and their approach to similar themes during an overlapping era, as well as the enduring influences that they had on each other and on other writers (the author mentions John Kennedy Toole, etc.).

All four sought to define through their work the roll that religion plays in the modern world and in their own lives, and this book gives a particularly insightful and well analyzed overview of how each of them went about this all-important task. The author has clearly done a great deal of research. The contemporary commentary he includes about each author is fascinating.

This book was particularly interesting to me because I am quite familiar with most of Flannery O'Connor's work, and it was wonderful to finally be able to connect her stories to her life and to the time and place she was writing from.

I highly recommend this to all searchers, and to those interested in that which is mysterious in life and religion. This book should be read by all people interested in Catholicism in America, religion in the modern work, and in literature or American History in general.

An excellent read, the livesof Merton,Day,Percy and O Connor beautifully melded and yet distinct. I highly recomend this book for all lovers of literature as well as Christians.

Inevitably, the attempt to merge four writers into one narrative that reviews their correspondence, books, essays, pronouncements, talks, and travels makes for an ambitious if uneven journey. Percy's Christian existentialism by contrast with his determinedly contrary if congenitally eccentric fellow Southerner O'Connor's keen eye and bitter comedy comes off as aloof, bookish, and not that interesting if by no fault of his own. His novels nearly all pale by comparison with her best fiction, and Elie has difficulty making some of his lesser novels even minimally engaging.

Day, by contrast with Merton, herself suffers from asceticism! While the two converts and one-time near counterparts in NYC progressive political and au courant literati circles in the years between the wars (albeit at some remove from each other's direct influence and circles of friends) share roots in what we'd call the typical avant-garde movements of Modernism and experimentation that generally any bright young thing in an urban East Coast environment has wandered into over our past decades, Day comes across as markedly more inflexible, so as to anchor her pacifist and anarchist commitment to individual choice to live the Gospel as "fools for Christ" must. Merton learns by contrast to adjust whether to his moral shifts before he entered the Trappists, his infatuation with the Abbey of Gethsemani and his sudden fame after he wrote his memoir, his diagnosis by a shrink as a "narcissist hermit," and his love affair with a nurse in the mid-1960s just as so many of his clerical colleagues were reneging on their vows and falling in love themselves with women rather than, or as well as, their calling to separate themselves from the ties that bind most of us, or used to.

Elie makes the best out of the enormous secondary criticism that has accrued around O'Connor, and of the correspondence and previously censored material now available to Merton scholars. He gives instructive close readings of "Wise Blood" and "Everything that Rises Must Converge" as well as contrasting the letters to Elizabeth Hester that show her public manner as preserved for posterity vs. hints of a more combative and much less PC Jim Crow-era attitude in her letters to Maryat Lee. The hints of what happened to Robert Lowell as a result of his manic visions of God and Caroline Gordon's own descent into a rigid form of Catholic scrupulosity needed more detail, however. Percy's life fails to emerge, and his family and career shimmer only vaguely throughout. Also, we have almost no sense of what Flannery did in college or during her MFA years in Iowa City, not to mention her own NYC stint prior to her diagnosis for lupus. I wanted more connection of her own urban flourishing to tie in to Merton's previous trajectory there, and Day's own movement away from the secular boho to the Catholic boho contigent, but perhaps such tracks remain too vague for serious biographers to retrace or imagine.

Well-chosen photos: young Percy strolling a German rustic trail, Day in the Bob Fitch snapshot of her sitting defiantly as two sheriffs loom to arrest her at a UFW rally, O'Connor radiant as she holds a new copy of "Wise Blood," Merton slouching in a straw hat and kicking back against a bench on the day of his ordination. These enliven these writers, too often reduced to small book jacket photos we have seen perhaps too often.

Percy appears genial if gloomy. The loss of much of his correspondence, unlike the stacks of carbons that fill up the enormous epistolary collection "The Habit of Being " for O'Connor and the letters and diaries for Merton posthumously published may explain Percy's diminished presence vs. his other two rivals for literary and spiritual audiences. Day seems not to be much interested in writing even though she dutifully published her memoir, carefully glossed as was Merton's for a more reticent era, "The Long Loneliness." Day early on appears to have chosen a lifestyle and a manner committed to renunciation of her own early fling, her sexual adventurism (although by our standards she and Merton are the norm, more or less, for those raised less religiously at least today), and her flirtation with Marxist and leftist movements. I like Merton's advice around the time of the grandstanding Berrigan Brothers agitprop: "I think the best thing is to belong to a universal anti-movement underground." (qtd. 396)

Elie is at his best in this section, as he shows how Day separated herself from the peacenik hippie priests and those playing to the camera while "the whole world is watching" in the later 60s for revolution that made Jesus a proto-Che. Elie explains that Day took pains to empathize with the other side, always, and not to place any dogma or manifesto between her and her identification with those who may have not wanted war in Vietnam but who could not be led to sympathize with guitar-strumming hippies and angry clerics spilling napalm and blood on shredded draft documents as cameras rolled. Merton, too, as Elie takes great care in documenting, struggled to be a leader of the Catholic reformers and the progressive left from his hermitage on the Abbey grounds where civil rights organizers and leftist luminaries made their own pilgrimages to meet with him and where he attempted to stay in touch from behind the monastery walls with a world that he knew needed his advice even as he vowed to stay faithful, at terrible and necessary personal cost, to his promises to remain a loyal priest and obedient monk. Merton too shrank from the violence that inspired young people to immolate themselves as burnt offerings against the war, and soon enough he too would meet in his sudden death "the Christ of the burnt ones" to whom he ended his memoir "The Seven Story Mountain".

O'Connor, being like Merton the more familiar of the four writers, comes across like him as the one you might like to meet and chat with, although unlike Fr. Louis I would fear reading about myself in her letters after the fact. Day's harder to make appealing, as her severity and devotion to seeing the Lord in the shattered ones kept her focused upon the less prosaic and less easily dramatized side of life that eschews sentimentality and exalts the utterly assured recognition of the Messiah in the poor and the crazed and deluded ones. Her choice, despite the convulsions of the Catholic Worker Movement and the fact that she could rarely find the time alone that Percy, Merton, and O'Connor needed to become speakers to the rest of us, "making oratory out of solitude," does make her active apostolate all the more admirable.

I conclude with a couple of passages. Elie compares O'Connor with Merton, Day, and Percy. Discussing an admittedly unlikely essay anthology in the tumultuous days of '69, "Mystery & Manners," Elie describes how she combined "objectivity and fierce personal conviction," speaking out of "aloneness and absoluteness," and how her Southern allegiance in the North, as "a believer in a disbelieving literary society," as "an artist in a church of philistines," transcends loneliness or alienation. What she and her fellow writers share is what all believers today share: "the aloneness of the religious believer generally." (426) She knows faith, the "substance for things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen," as I paraphrase the old Baltimore Catechism (as Elie I recall did much earlier in his book).

If O'Connor derived her power from her inflexibility, Elie continues, Merton by his sudden death escaped the end-time days of rage constant upendings of the 60s. His fluidity enabled him "to represent and call forth the aspirations of others." (427)

Elie finds his appeal in his "radical identification of himself with another" that evoked in his readers a similar identification. Merton was able to mature and recognize that his smarts, his charism, his desire for the spotlight could be used to turn attention from himself as the bestselling contemplative, the talkative monk, the literary talent submitting his work to censors (well, at least most of the time--the love letters he sent his nurse Margie notwithstanding, and showing the humanity that endured and made him ultimately a better monk and a kinder Christian at again what must have been enormous sacrifice and, at fifty-two, having to "grow up" even more). He had the gift of getting us to feel as if we were in his sandals, observing wryly and compassionately and righteously what he could see from beyond the walls around his hermitage, and beneath his own defenses within himself, schooled as he was in all the trends of the literati at the shrink.

A year and a half before his death, Merton in the thick of the antiwar campaigns addressed his brothers outside the monastery. Reading Camus, Merton came to realize the existential predicament for the believer mattered as much as for those like Camus who could not return to believe what they had left behind. Merton reflects in the letter to his superiors that he has moved beyond the "answers" that his early years in the monastery once led him to think that he had gained.

"Can a man make sense of his existence? Can a man honestly give his life meaning merely by adopting a certain set of explanations which pretend to tell him why the world began and where it will end, why there is evil and what is necessary for a good life? [. . . .] I have been summoned to explore a desert area of man' s heart in which explanations no longer suffice, and which one learns that only experience counts." (qtd. 402)

This journey into the arid regions impels the monk. He leaves the world's distractions to concentrate upon the battle within, and behind the defenses of the cloister he stands vulnerable "to remain open to God wholly and directly." Whether God answers is not up to the monk. Merton finds God must be known, not proven. "To seek to solve the problem of God is to seek to see one's own eyes."

Elie on the last page sums up how these four writers' predicament is now that of any believer, half a century and more now since these four writers thought and argued and prayed. Elie insists that they all knew what any believer or unbeliever today knows: authority lies not on the institutional Church or a social monolith commanding conformity to the Magisterium. Elie imagines a reform of today, for assimilating or uncertain Catholics, or anyone "quasi-religious," might be abandoning the idea of a true faith. Elie tells us now that "clear lines of orthodoxy are made crooked by our experiences and complicated by our lives." (472)

All of us look for signs. Readers, we are trained to and thrive by our own pilgrimage for meaning. Elie notes that "the burden of proof, indeed the burden of belief, for so long upheld by society, is now back on the believer, where it belongs." Now we have the testimony of Day and O'Connor, Merton and Percy, who all had to balance their unwanted label as "Catholic writers" or intellectuals in thrall to the Vatican with their own real tensions and longings and upsets. They imagined their own afflictions and some made poems and fiction out of it, others and other times these became editorials, letters, diaries, and conversations. And, the four new evangelists all witness to us, as evangels, messengers, of the pilgrimages they too stumbled through as their narratives ended.

What a joy this was to read! My personal thanks to Paul Elie for showing me how these four exemplary literary figures of my generation managed to live out a life of love and creativity within their constant struggle for faith. Such a universal story of people moored by the faith, but beset by the pityful human sinfulness of the institutional Church. Elie shows us how Merton, Flannery O'Connor,Dorothy Day and Walker Percy, renegades all, pursued their art and intellectual/spiritual quests in such different ways. Though I have read almost all of Merton and O'Connor and much of Day and Percy, it was with particular joy that I learned how much these figures overlapped in time and space, knew each other and were often correspondents. Elie's weaving into the text much of their correspondence gave me new perspectives.

This attempt to link Day, Merton, O'Connor, and Percy doesn't work. While it's true they were Catholic writers whose lives overlapped to some degree and who read each other's work to some extent, it's also true that their lives were extremely different and that they rarely had contact with one another--a few meetings, some small bits of correspondence.

Also, the Publisher's Weekly reviewer is incorrect: the book is ponderous, and the prose is the very definition of workmanlike. The author was evidently attempting a self-consciously literary style--lofty, philosophical--alas for his readers. The writing reaches a particular crescendo of blandness in the pages when these Catholic writers come to the end of their lives. In fact, I couldn't quite make out how Merton had died from the account here and had to look it up on Wikipedia.

Perhaps because of the detached prose style, I felt that the author had little if any affinity for either the writers or their writings. The New Yorker says O'Connor is his favorite, but Day comes off best in the book, as the author sympathizes with the Catholic Worker movement and with Day's pacifism. He also seems to have found value in Wise Blood and the Moviegoer.

In general I wondered if the author's own pilgrimage in writing this book had left him fatigued and simply glad to be finished with it. I know that's how I felt by the end.

On the positive side, I did find some of the details of these writers' early lives fascinating. If you have not read such details in other biographies or autobiographical writings, you might find it worthwhile to check out the first half of this book.

The book reads with less action then the current style of writing. Her writing is excellent.

I am new to Flannery O'Connor. My introduction to her was through popular culture. She was mentioned in an interview with Bono and Sufjan Stevens adores her. And who hasn't heard of "A Good Man is Hard to Find," even if they haven't read it? Regardless, I don't read a lot of fiction, and am by no means a literary critic, but some thoughts follow.

I can't say why I started with this book and not "A Good Man...", other than that I wanted to start with something that was not as familiar. Having read nothing about the book prior to reading it (which is the best way to experience it), I came away utterly astonished at what I had read. To echo another reviewer's comments, sometimes it becomes excruciatingly painful to continue reading, but I was so drawn into the story that I couldn't put it down. I knew of O'Connor's penchant for shock, but there was one event in particular that I was absolutely unprepared for, and I'll let the reader discover what that was.

I'm very impressed with O'Connor's crisp style, which is intelligent yet accessible and capable of vividly portraying the internal transformation of her characters. She is also gifted in her manipulation of her characters' faults to serve the drama. One example of this genius was revealed when I found out why Rayber had a hearing aid--not why he needed one, but why the story needed him to have one. It was a masterful stroke.

My only complaint is that Frances, at age 14, seemed far more sure of himself and the world around him and what he wanted and didn't want than are most real children his age. In that regard, he was a little unbelievable, but it didn't take too much away from my enjoyment of this haunting, beautiful, and astonishing novel.

O'Connor second and last novel is a sometimes comic yet ultimately tragic novel about a young Southern boy's spiritual development. Francis Tarwater, who is fourteen years old, has been sheltered from society in the Alabama boondocks by his great-uncle, Old Tarwater, who is grooming the boy to be a somewhat reluctant prophet, espousing a unique hybrid of countrified Christianity.

The novel's plot is simultaneously bizarre in event and puzzling in intent, and it is heavy with Old Testament imagery. At the opening of the novel, Old Tarwater has died, leaving Francis with the task of burying him. The boy abandons his assignment and flees to the city, searching for an atheistic uncle, George Rayber, who had spurned Old Tarwater's lessons decades earlier. During his life, Old Tarwater had been obsessed with need to baptize Bishop's mentally handicapped son, and Francis wavers between the need to complete his great-uncle's mission and his reluctance to follow in the old man's footsteps.

The bulk of the story, however, concerns the struggle between Francis and his uncle George--between metaphysical belief and secular knowledge. George is a parody of the arrogance of modern thinking; he is wedded to the belief that humans are shaped by their environment and by the atoms of which they are composed. Francis, on the other hand, is a portrait of the mysterious and even violent nature of religious passion.

Scholars and a legion of the author's fans have pointed out (correctly) that O'Connor did not mean Francis's character to be a satirical depiction of religious fanaticism. Yet the many critics and students who have mistaken both Francis and Old Tarwater as caricatures underscore the novel's greatest weakness; the social context has run away from the author. Even in 1960, when the novel was published, the two "hicks" seemed vaguely preposterous and dangerously harebrained to many reviewers (much to O'Connor's chagrin), and today's readers have an even more difficult time seeing these two-would be prophets as anything more than backwoods stereotypes.

Yet this tension between the author's intentions and the reader's reception hardly diminishes the power of O'Connor's vision; if anything, its accidental parody of fundamentalism offsets her deliberate (and undeniably unfair) satire of secularism. As in her other work, O'Connor is exploring the difficulty of seeking (and of finding) spiritual deliverance, especially since the path to salvation often leads the seeker away from the individuality of his or her own identity. The struggle that O'Connor portrays--between religion and secularism--is surely as present and relevant today as it is was fifty years ago.

I am in awe of Flannery O'Connor. After studying her in college, I finally sat down to read this novel and was captivated the entire time. I just saw a screening of the movie No Country For Old Men, a film that really reminded me of O'Connor, specifically the short story A Good Man is Hard To Find, which got me thinking again about how much I love her writing. O'Connor has a unique tone to her writing, and it's one that really speaks to me as a reader. The plot was fascinating and had several truly memorable scenes that are haunting and sad, yet her work has a darkly comic tone through much of the novel. Impossible to resist! I would suggest this novel to anyone who is a fan of great fiction and I plan on reading as many of her works as possible.

And off Francis Marion Tarwater goes, into to the city to realize his destiny as prophet (and religious zealot.) What a beautiful book this is. Both Mason Tarwater and Rayber are two people whom I would never like to come across. Both are extremes of self-righteousness that I despise. Notice how O'Connor repeatedly uses the themes of destruction and redemption. A death underwater, but a baptism at the same time; a rape, but "eyes burned clean." Heady stuff.
Put away your Faulkner, and start reading O'Connor. The old man should have come and taken lessons from the young woman.

PS: O'Connor was 35 when this book came out in 1960, and died at 39 years of age in 1964.

Flannery O'Connor (1925 - 1964) was a Southern writer and a Catholic writer, the former obvious if you have only read one or two of her stories excerpted in an anthology, the latter apparent as you read a full collection of stories or a novel. EVERYTHING THAT RISES MUST CONVERGE is her last collection of short fiction. It is strong and revealing of her considerable talents and themes. The stories included are the title fiction, as well as "Greenleaf," "A View of the Woods," "The Enduring Chill," "The Comforts of Home," "The Lame Shall Enter First," "Revelation," "Parker's Back" and "Judgement (sic) Day."

The title story sets the beat for those that follow. In the mid 20th century, O'Connor finds a south that is still coming to terms with the Civil War and on top of that must deal with the new social imperatives brought on by the civil rights movement. The characters in conflict are often parents and children, one usually trying to preserve the once known world, the other trying to accommodate the new social order and progress, neither ever getting it right. In fact, they often get it so wrong as to the point of tragic loss. Her stories swoop with human comedy and high tragedy in pursuit of a moral vision. There is often incredible violence.

First and foremost about her stories is that they are so very readable. Characters are deftly sketched, her narrative voice is straightforward. Her plots are sturdily built. And if the stories are variations on similar characters, themes, conflicts and consequences, each is remarkably distinct, its own entity. The critical introduction to this edition is by a longtime friend of O'Connor's, Robert Fitzgerald, who provides biographical context.

Most of the stories in this wonderful collection turn on a recurrent conflict, the war between parents and their own children. In this, the titular story is representative; a bratty child with what could be called a Northern higher education is pitted against a Southern parent distinguished by finer, older manners, but racism as well.

O'Connor's treatment of this theme is both hilarious and sad. With wit and delicacy, she exposes "the people gap," that funny but frightening separation even of those persons presumed to share great intimacy. Her vision in this regard coincides with the witty paradox of George Bernard Shaw who famously declared, "There are no greater strangers than parents and their own children."

Flannery O'Connor's novel is a blending together of nine short stories, all independent of one another working together to achieve a common goal. In my opinion, if I have read 155 books in my life, this book does not make the top 150. No single story was very appealing, making it nine slow starts and nine mediocre finishes. To give a more objective view of the book, it was written in a third person omniscient point of view. O'Connor takes a somewhat cynical approach toward each of her characters. In their descriptions, the flaws of each character are pointed out rather than the virtues. These are some of the more obvious styles that O'Connor uses. In the stories, various devices are used. Among these are flashback, imagery, and hyperbole. Each of these individually contributes to the overall story. Without these devices, the point O'Connor was trying to make would not be as solid. The overall theme in the book seen throughout the stories is a need for personal change. Each protagonist goes through a series of events and detailed descriptions of what is wrong with everyone else, only to point the finger at themselves at the end. The moral of this is that rather than trying to pin our problems on others, maybe we should take responsibilities for our own flaws. If from what I have said you still wish to read the book, by all means, go ahead. Many people have liked this book, but I am quite convinced, it is not my style.

I confess I had never heard of Flannery O'Connor until recently perusing a list of National Book Award winners (for her posthumous 1972 collection, 'The Complete Stories'). I wasn't even sure if Flannery was a man or a woman, American or Irish. After reading just one of her short stories I became a devoted follower.

Flannery O'Connor is one of great American writers of the 20th century, a Southern Gothic stylist of the first order.

O'Connor sets her stories in the rural South and populates them with twisted characters - this is not the imagined noble, glorious, and chivalric South, but rather the real South of the poor and middling whites of the 1950's (race is mostly in the background). She catches the nuances of human behavior. Her stories have powerful, unexpected and disturbing endings.

Pick up a story and read just one paragraph and you will be hooked.

"Asbury's train stopped so that he would get off exactly where his mother was standing waiting to meet him. Her thin spectacled face below him was bright with a wide smile that disappeared as she caught sight of him bracing himself behind the conductor. The smile vanished so suddenly, the shocked look that replaced it was so complete, that he realized for the first time that he must look as ill as he was..."

Absolutely the highest recommendation.

For her first collection of stories ("A Good Man Is Hard to Find"), O'Connor gathered an assortment that had been previously published in magazines; the result was a fascinating, but unsystematic, potpourri of experimentation and originality. As she prepared the stories for "Everything That Rise Must Converge," however, she instead developed each selection under a thematic framework. (Only the last two stories, which were literally rushed to completion as she lay on her deathbed, seem to stand a bit apart.) The collection as a whole, even more than her previous fiction, emphasizes the absurdities and monstrosities of everyday life and the tension between the demands of the self and the mystery of the divine presence.

One of O'Connor's primary mentors for her approach to fiction was, surprisingly, James Joyce (and, specifically, "Dubliners"), and his influence is nowhere more obvious than in this book. In one story ("The Enduring Chill"), she pokes fun at Joyce's worldview in an exchange between an artist and a priest. She was surely alienated by Joyce's un-Catholic sentiments, but she acknowledged his influence in her essay "The Nature and Aim of Fiction": "The major difference between the novel as written in the eighteenth century and the novel as we usually find it today is the disappearance from it of the author. . . . By the time we get to James Joyce, the author is nowhere to be found in the book. The reader is on his own, floundering around in the thoughts of various unsavory characters."

"Unsavory characters" are, without doubt, O'Connor's specialty. Yet, is O'Connor effectively able to remove herself from her narratives? Do the stories in this collection succeed, as she intended, as a thematically linked sequence? And, aside from her stated literary goals, are these stories really that good?

Well, on the first two counts, the results are mixed. In spite of her intentions, O'Connor's presence crowds several of these stories. In "The Lame Shall Enter First" (my own favorite), a vague didacticism is obvious both in O'Connor's not-very-subtle manipulation of events and in the story's portrayals of the juvenile delinquent Rufus Johnson and his mentor Sheppard, a Good Samaritan wannabe. Yet O'Connor steps back just enough to allow the story itself to convey the depth of Sheppard's moral collapse. The less successful "Parker's Back" (one of the deathbed stories) concerns a "trailer trash" husband who, much to his wife's dismay, gets a tattoo of Jesus Christ inked on his back. It's one of O'Connor's more brilliant scenarios, but the psychological sermonizing of the omniscient narrator is a bit heavy-handed. The author is everywhere to be found in this story.

As for the collection's coherence: O'Connor moral vision is certainly more easily discernible in this book than in any of her previous works. But, like the "Lives of the Saints" she so cherished, O'Connor's hagiography of sinners, read back to back, occasionally suffers from a certain formulaic uniformity and predictability. Still, each story, enjoyed at random on its own, has the potential for being your "favorite O'Connor story"-and it's hard to find two readers who will agree on which stories in this collection are best. As a collection, then, it's a bit tame. Individually, however, the stories really are that good.

Throughout her career, O'Connor invented a gallery of memorable reprobates and unlikely prophets. Whether read separately or as a cycle, these nine stories add much to her unique legacy. And the collection will also help clear the air for readers (like me) who had always been enchanted by O'Connor's works of fiction but perplexed by critics who stress their theological and symbolic underpinnings.

One reviewer here writes of this book that "the material that was not plagiarized is quite brilliant." But the truth of the matter is that we will never know how much of it is (or is not) plagiarized (unless, of course, the author comes clean, which, given his sad excuses, seems highly unlikely). We now know that two of the stories are tainted ("Tuscaloosa Knights" and "Report from Junction"), which suggests that there may be others, though at this point looking further is really beside the point.

This book, "The Bear Bryant Funeral Train", the author's first, was removed from every bookstore shortly after publication, due to the discovery that the short story entitled "Tuscaloosa Knights" contained many sections that were, by the author's own admission, "heavily borrowed" from Carl Carmer's 1934 work, "Tuscaloosa Nights." "The Bear Bryant Funeral Train" won the highly coveted Flannery O'Connor Award, which usually rockets a young writer into a successful literary career, but which, in this sad case, very likely has ended a career just as it was beginning.

Because the publisher withdrew every copy from stores and destroyed all the copies, then withdrew the award from Mr. Vice, only a handful of copies remain, making this first-edition volume the key collector's item in the Flannery O'Connor series. Without a doubt, it will be worth many thousands of dollars in years to come. The publisher quietly removed all copies from stores before announcing that it was pulping the book--thus, very very few copies have actually made it into circulation.

All of this is truly a sad development, as the material that was not plagiarized is quite brilliant. I hope that Mr. Vice, who is being investigated on ethics charges at the university where he teaches, will be able to survive this unhappy event and go on to have the chance to publish another first book--this time one that he has written entirely on his own.

Brad Vice, The Bear Bryant Funeral Train (University of Georgia, 2005)

I think at this point everyone has heard of The Bear Bryant Funeral Train. Not because it won the Flannery O'Connor Award last year, but because the award got yanked after it was shown that Vice had plagiarized parts of the book's opening short story, "Tuscaloosa Knights." More's the pity, because it's actually the book's weakest offering. A second allegation of plagiarism has been made for "Report from Junction," another story that comes about halfway through the collection.

None of this is actually relevant to the review, and without getting into a discussion of "fair use" which would take up far more than a thousand words, is here only for purposes of completeness. No one has yet complained that Vice lifted a complete story, whole and unbroken-- only various passages and sentences. And what makes the stories in this collection so good is the way those passages and sentences are strung together. (I have hopes that eventually Brad Vice will turn out looking like the print version of the Evolution Control Committee, the idiocy of this whole thing will go away, and the book will be reprinted.)

The simple truth of the matter is that whether a stray line in story A came from book B by another author or not, Vice has penned a wonderful batch of stories in this debut collection. Most of them are little slices of Southern life, usually Depression-era or not long after. I wondered about halfway through the collection, though, why it had picked up the O'Connor; while Vice's stories are on the whole excellent, they didn't seem quite dark enough to be worthy of bearing Ms. O'Connor's hallowed name. That, of course, changed a couple of pages after I had the thought. The book's three final stories take the collection into places of darkness and despair that it hadn't previously seen.

The title story, especially, is a corker. Set in the slightly-near future, it concerns an auto designer who's obsessed with making a black and white short film (and an amusement park ride) based on the Bear Bryant funeral train. It is obsessed with its own detail, and it treats its characters in very nasty ways. A good man is hard to find, indeed, and when you find him, you may find that you don't want him nearly as much as you thought you did.

I'd strongly recommend going and picking this up at your earliest opportunity, but the University of Georgia recalled all outstanding copies and pulped them. (They were going for as high as a thousand bucks apiece on Amazon, and may still be.) If your library is one of the few holdouts who still has a copy, I'd grab it and read it ASAP, because it's entirely possible that, otherwise, you will never get the chance. Stunning. ****

Listen: the book is awesome. A bunch of people who didn't understand the literary strategy of the book got real upset and railroaded the hardcover edition out of print. That was a shame, and the shame was not on Brad Vice. It was a big huge loss, too, because these stories are damn good, and they don't read the same way as some of the sources upon which a couple of them are based.

Brad Vice, by now, ought to be enjoying the rewards good work brings. I hope, at least, he's enjoying the good work itself, as I have been again this week. I give The Bear Bryant Funeral Train my strongest recommendation, and my bookshelves are holding a few spots open for future Brad Vice books.

Yes, there is some controversy about this little book, but discerning readers should not let that take away from the brilliance of other stories around which there is no controversy. The chapters on "Chickensnake" and "Mules" are brilliant. Truly brilliant. Others border on brilliance as well. Combined with Bobby Dews' collection of short stories "Legends, Demons and Dreams," you have the best of Southern fiction today. Forget the controversy. Read the book. It's well worth it. So is Bobby Dews' book.

This book is both an insightful exploration of O'Connor's dynamic Christian parables as well as an inspirational compilation of Christ-centered homilies. Christ, the South, and O'Connor are a holy trinity better appreciated by reading this book.

Wood's Collection still seems to wonder about Flannery O'Connor's religion. It would be very satisfying to find a statement of the author herself which expresses her thinking on the subject.
Such a statement actually exists in the public domain. The Xavier Review Vol. 5 ,New Orleans, 1985, reprints two letters by Flannery. The first expresses her total and enthusiastic endorsement of an essay on her work in Vol 2 NO 1 of THE XAVIER UNIVERSITY STUDIES, "Shock and Orthodoxy: An Interpretation of Flannery O'Connor's Novels and Short Stories." It leaves no doubt about her theology.

Tolle, lege!

I ordered this book because Amazon lets you read a page of it and I was immediately hooked. It seems to be a collection of essays, despite lines like "this chapter will attempt to show", and the essays and what they attempt to show vary greatly. I'm not sure who the audience is for this book, because it arguably belongs to the genre of literary criticism, usually aimed at a small and like-minded readership. There are quite a few books about Flannery O'Connor like that.

But this one is different for a few reasons. Lit crit books hardly ever make definite conclusions, at best advancing one of a number of competing theories, drawing it out or justifying it from the text, and supporting it with analysis and commentary.

In Wood's book, O'Connor plays the supporting role for his own theories, sometimes taking center stage and sometimes appearing only marginally. Wood also closes each chapter with an overkill of summing up, forcing the salient texts to his own conclusions (which makes me think the chapters were essays). These seem to me like typically Baptist views, although he makes O'Connor as a Catholic support them.

That would be grounds for me to dismiss the book were that all there was to it. However, Wood masterfully considers O'Connor in relation to her own "true country" of the South, immersing readers in the social millieu in which she wrote. He goes further, tracing the impact of the civil religion of the 'fifties, the odd-duck compromise that drained Protestant and Catholic theology alike, and which O'Connor detested. Like so many writers versed in that era, however, he assumes he can merely refer to Karl Barth and Rheinhold Niebuhr and everyone will know what he means. Thus he never introduces his sources, merely dragging in the big guns to support his ideas.

As two other books have tried to show, this won't fly. The author of Jesus in America shows that civil religion, with its well-intentioned mantra of "deeds not creeds" was so all-encompassing that lay theology books (so called) were best-sellers, whether yea or nay. In The Goodly Word, Ellwood Johnson shows how Puritan ideas and language from Colonial times on became enshrined in increasingly secular literature. Some sense of this process, and its offspring, 'fifties civil religion, is necessary to enlighten Wood's many asides and attributions.

That process reached a peak in the 1920s when H.L. Mencken made the derisive comment that if you threw an egg off a bus you would hit a fundamentalist. His open criticisms of the South, as Wood shows, led to the formation of the Southern Agrarian writers group. Wood tackles the thorny problem of the South--its historical racialism, but he also shows why O'Connor did not adopt the tactics of the Northern attackers, afraid that "the South's few virtues would be destroyed along with its many vices."

O'Connor also found herself at odds with the liberal Catholic version of civil religion, as in her famous comment on the Eucharist: "if it's a symbol, then the hell with it." As Wood sympathetically explains O'Connor's sacramental view, I have no problem understanding why O'Connor was a Catholic. My only question is why Wood isn't one.

Excellent book. Author has a long history of studying O'Connor and is friendly to her point of view and religious orientation, even though his is not the same.

Wood's study is a sensitive treatment that brings Southern culture and O'Connor's fiction into a reciprocally illuminating focus. Six of the book's eight chapters appear here as much-revised versions of previously published essays. Even so, the book hangs together effectively as a monograph. Its signal contribution to studies of O'Connor's work comes especially in its theological analysis, which relates her thought not only to the Catholic tradition but to twentieth-century Protestant theologians like Karl Barth and Reinhold Niebuhr.

Wood begins in chapter 1 by detailing how O'Connor's orthodox, sacramental and deeply iconic Catholicism gave her an appreciation for the Bible-centered Protestant fundamentalism typical of her native region. While revisiting "The Violent Bear It Away," "A Good Man Is Hard to Find," and "Parker's Back," he shows how the fanaticism of the backwoods country preachers and misfits in her fiction opens them to transcendent realities to which the nihilism and lukewarm liberalism of modernity remain oblivious.

He proceeds in chapter 2 to describe how the great "burden of Southern history"--the South's loss in the Civil War--imbued Southern culture and its literature with a sense of human finitude at once tragic and true. Wood brings O'Connor's unique perspective into conversation with H. L. Mencken's notorious disdain for the South, which he derisively labeled "the Sahara of the Bozart"; with the Agrarian author and former disciple of Mencken, Allen Tate, whose defense of antebellum Southern culture obliged him to jettison the specific truths of Christianity; and with Eugene Genovese, the former Marxist cum rehabilitated Catholic, whose analysis of antebellum slavery provides a corrective to Tate. Wood also makes brief forays into the Scopes trial, snakehandling, and O'Connor's luminous story "Greenleaf."

When he turns in chapter 3 to "the problem of the color line," Wood reveals how complicated were O'Connor's attitudes toward race relations. Although she was a strong advocate of the basic goals of the Civil Rights movement, she disdained condescending, quick fixes that would force blacks and whites into a contrived and ultimately dehumanizing closeness. Wood makes fruitful comparisons and contrasts with another of the South's great writers, Eudora Welty, and with O'Connor's friend, the Northern liberal Maryat Lee; he follows them with careful readings of "The Enduring Chill" and "Everything That Rise Must Converge."

Chapter 4, "The South as a Mannered and Mysteriously Redemptive Region" scrutinizes the formal gestures that established both closeness and distance in the social intercourse of blacks and whites in the South. Wood offers an extended treatment of the last story O'Connor wrote, "Judgment Day" (a recast version of her first story, "The Geranium") and an acute theological analysis of her personal favorite, "The Artificial Nigger."

In chapter 5 Wood examines preaching as the 'sacrament' of Southern fundamentalism, drawing on the work of Karl Barth, whom many readers will be surprised to learn was a major influence on O'Connor, and giving voice to her three multigenerational preachers, the nihilist Hazel Motes in "Wise Blood," the teen Bevel Summers in "The River," and the child Lucette Carmody in "The Violent Bear It Away".

In chapter 6, Wood's essay on "demonic nihilism" as "the chief temptation of modernity" demonstrates how full and fair a hearing O'Connor gave the atheists in her fiction, the most memorable of whom is Hulga Hopewell in the painfully comic story "Good Country People." Wood details O'Connor's respect for Nietzsche, Heidegger, Sartre, and Camus and resorts once again to Barth, this time for his exploration of the nature of evil.

Chapter 7, "Vocation: The Divine Summons to Drastic Witness," traces O'Connor's understanding of vocation with a close examination of her uncouth prophet, Mason Tarwater. For O'Connor "the image of God in man must be wrenched from its unnatural thralldom to false lords"; vocation, defined as "the summons to live out the privileges and requirements of the Christian faith" is the touchstone of this wrenching.

Wood's final chapter 8, "Climbing the Starry Field and Shouting Hallelujah: O'Connor's Vision of the World to Come, " examines O'Connor's eschatology, focusing on those moments of grace that conclude most of her short stories and choosing as his examples the atheist Rayber in "The Violent Bear It Way" and Mrs. Ruby Turpin in "Revelation."

To his credit, Wood never stumbles over the scandal of O'Connor's stories, never blunts the hard edge of her characters, and never apologizes for the grotesque idiom she chose for her work. Perhaps the greatest merit of his study, though, is his engagement with the irreducibly theological character of O'Connor's fiction and unashamed owning of the truth claims that suffuse it.