Flannery O'Connor

In terms of literary interests, short stories have never been my thing. Often - as with William Trevor, or later Updike - they're simply too precious. There's not enough there, and the result, I find, are paragraphs so delicately constructed you begin to wonder whether they'll crumble in the wind. (This, incidentally, is also how I feel about the work of Marilynne Robinson. But that's for another time.)

Crumbling, however, is not a word I would associate with Flannery O'Connor. The collection of stories comprising A Good Man is Hard to Find (a collection I've recently completed) are some of the finest I've read. I was floored by O'Connor: she wrote with such consistency, her prose so steady and rhythmic. 

In some of my favorite stories - longer tales like "Good Country People" and "The Displaced Person" - O'Connor probes the space just below the surface, revealing its complexity, its violence and despair. She does so with an unusual economy of language, and with a narrative that seems brave and unflinching. 

But more than that: O'Connor was a voice of the South, for the South, and there are stories in this collection that - for me, at least - rival the work of Faulkner. I know, I know - that's sacrilege. But it's true: stories like "The River" so deeply communicate the Southern experience that they end up imparting more, I think, than they intend. At times, I understood A Good Man as a more readable, more calculating Absalom, Absalom!. In O'Connor, clarity abounds - as does a sense of fidelity. 

There's so much to admire in these stories: their persistence, their darkness, their courage and penetration. The South is exposed here, but so, too, is the human condition. This, I suppose, is a version of the American Gothic: cruel and violent, odd and local. Add those traits together and you're confronted with a remarkable collection of stories defined by a redemptive quality, by a stubborn and everlasting pursuit of grace.