Saturday, June 11, 2011

Literary Classic: A Good Man Is Hard To Find and Other Stories by Flannery O'Connor

Flannery O'Connor is one of the most well-known names from 20th century literature.  She wrote two novels, Wise Blood and The Violent Bear It Away, before her early death at thirty-nine years of age.  She is probably more revered for her two collections, A Good Man Is Hard To Find and the posthumously published Everything That Rises Must Converge.  In 1972, she won the National Book Award (also posthumously) for her Complete Stories.  She is absolutely among the greatest short story writers of all time.

I remember reading three of her stories for my AP English class with Mrs. Taylor during senior year of high school: "Greenleaf," "The Enduring Chill," and "Parker's Back."  They were strange and alluring, eccentric tales, and my curiosity was piqued.  Somehow I did not have to read her for any of my college courses, but she's always been in the back of my mind.  Last month, one of my book groups decided to tackle our first collection of short stories (we've only read novels up to this point), and we unanimously selected O'Connor's A Good Man Is Hard To Find.

This collection of ten stories produced some of the most famous and studied titles in recent memory, including "A Late Encounter With The Enemy," "Good Country People," and "The Displaced Person."  It's a bleak book, full of desperate, tortured, and unhappy characters, and lots of uncomfortable situations.  O'Connor's style is often labeled Southern Gothic, and she is compared to writers like Eudora Welty, William Faulkner, and Carson McCullers.  Her tales are not for the faint of heart.

In all honesty, though, Flannery O'Connor did not write like anyone before or since.  Her style is unique and entirely her own, which is a large part of the reason these works have stood the test of time.  Yes, the South of the 1950s is a huge part of the stories' fabric, which places her alongside Eudora Welty.  However, Welty's stories were written in a much more formal style, and violence and danger were merely undercurrents.  O'Connor, on the other hand, writes in a quick, blunt style with slight echoes of Hemingway, and violence is right on the surface of these sometimes chilling tales.  The only living author I can think of whose stories bear a slight resemblance to O'Connor is Joyce Carol Oates, but again, these comparisons are not overt.

The title story, " A Good Man Is Hard To Find," is possibly the most well-known in this batch.  It follows a family of six as they take off on a road trip.  They are not a happy bunch.  The grandmother, known only as The Grandmother, is constantly harping at her son, Bailey.  Her grandchildren, a boy and girl, are argumentative and fidgety.  Bailey himself is often finding fault with his old mother, yelling at and insulting her more than once.  His wife (also nameless) and newborn baby don't have much to do.  When the grandmother's cat jumps out of a basket and startles Bailey, he drives their car down into a ravine.  They are soon "rescued," but the rescuers are a group of bandits led by a notorious killer named The Misfit who has been referenced since the opening of the story.  What happens next is horrific, even by today's standards, and you'll not soon forget this tale.

Flannery O'Connor was a Roman Catholic, and many of her stories involve characters searching for grace, pondering grace, or finding grace at an unlikely moment.  Religion was an integral part of her work.  It also cannot be denied that many of her characters are racist, uneducated, and coarse.  She was writing what was real to her in that time and place, and it's often ugly and hateful.  You can argue that she was making deeper points than are readily apparent in some of the stories, possibly trying to combat racism by exposing it at its brutal core.  These are issues that have been debated for more than fifty years, and readers will have to make up their own minds.

The endings of O'Connor's stories are often abrupt and startling, and they leave you wanting more.  Sometimes, the conclusions raise more questions than answers, which again reminds me of some of the short stories of Joyce Carol Oates.  There is symbolism in many of these stories, as well as allegory, metaphor, and irony.  O'Connor employed many literary techniques and used each them in an expert manner.

There is something sinister in almost every story in this collection.  O'Connor is exploring the dark facets of human nature, but again, she also allows her characters to find moments of grace, albeit in strange ways.  She addressed themes that were somewhat ahead of their time, as in the story "A Stroke of Good Fortune," wherein the protagonist is disgusted and dismayed to find herself pregnant. 

I cannot say that reading A Good Man Is Hard To Find is a particularly pleasant experience, because so many of the stories are bleak.  However, it is definitely an intriguing, challenging, and revelatory experience, and certainly worth it to see one of the masters of the short story form at the peak of her powers.  There is a reason that some authors are considered essential touchstones of fiction.  Flannery O'Connor is one of the literary greats, with an uncontested place in the canon.

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