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4.5
Somehow, despite being an English teacher, despite loving Southern Gothic writing, despite the fact that I now teach at a Catholic high school (and my extended family is at least somewhat Catholic), despite my love of dark humor and outcasts writing about society, I made it very far into my life without reading a word by Flannery O’Connor. More than forty years, in fact, which meant that I was actually pretty excited to read A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories after not getting to it for so long – and all the more disappointed when I found myself respecting the book a lot, but not particularly enjoying it.Let’s get out of the way: O’Connor absolutely knows how to write her characters and her stories; indeed, over the course of these tales, it’s hard to escape how much she nails the mundane hypocrisies and interactions of Southern towns, or the ways that Christianity infuses so much of life even without explicitly being a part of it. She perfectly captures people’s selfish actions and their cruelties, the perverse moments where they’ll do something mean without even thinking about the ramification; and yes, there’s a dark humor through all of it as she sees human nature through the lens of that nihilistic cruelty so many people are capable of.And yet, as much as I admire her craft, and I respect her ability to write characters, and admit that there’s a dark sense of irony and humor to it all, I found myself struggling to find much to enjoy here. Much as I did with Shirley Jackson’s collection of short stories, I found myself intellectually engaged but often frustrated with the stories themselves, which are often more oblique and “literary” than I find satisfying. (It doesn’t help that the story opens with its best entry, the title story, which does live up to its reputation and then some, but also sets a bar for the rest of the book to live up to, as well as setting expectations about what’s to come that don’t quite fit the other stories in the collection.) For as Gothic and stark as her worldview can be, O’Connor never quite hit my sweet spot of nasty fun that the best stories do (as ever, my go-to example here is Jackson’s “Possibility of Evil,” one of the most flawless stories ever written about small town hypocrisy and the perverse cruelty of people).Is Flannery O’Connor a worthy writer? Oh, heavens, yes; her prose, her mood, her perfect sense of how people act towards each other – all of it absolutely recreates so many interactions I’ve watched in my life, particularly between Southerners of a certain age. But my appreciation never moved from respect and admiration into passion and love, sadly. It’s very good, yes, but it’s not something that I found myself motivated to read more of – and the fault, I know, is in me and not the stories, but that’s how it goes sometimes.
