bonyfaci138f

I keep reading Flannery O’ Connor, because she is was a talented writer, and I do enjoy her Southern Grotesque characters in her books and stories. I know that she was a devout Catholic in an area of the world where Catholics are very rare, and thereby grew up in an attitude of what I call “siege Catholicism” – us against the world. (Trust me, I know of this, having lived for ten years as a Catholic in West Virginia.) But I’ll be hog-tied and branded if I can ever see anything “Catholic” in her writing; so far as I can tell, it matters not to her work if she was Catholic or Baptist or Jehovah’s Witness. But I did enjoy this collection of stories for my bedtime reading. The stories date from the latter part of O’ Connor’s writing career, before she died. (She did not die of lupus; lupus is an auto-immune disease that leaves you open for everything else to come and try to kill you.) The Wikipedia entry for the title story states, “In the story after which the work is titled, human weaknesses are exposed and important moral questions are explored through everyday situations.” In a nutshell, that statement could be used to define all the stories – the situations are ordinary, but raise questions because of how her characters act and re-act in those situations. These nine stories include such gems as “Greenleaf” (which I read in an anthology short story collection, not long ago), ”The Lame Shall Enter First”, and “Parker’s Back”. Most of the characters either have a distorted view of God, or a distorted view of society, or, not unusually, both. I am not sure who would come out ahead in Celebrity Deathmath if we were to pit Flannery O’ Connor and William Faulkner together, but it’s an interesting mental exercise. I did enjoy these stories, but I can’t explain why, because I can’t explain the stories; they leave you feeling like you have been around too much static electricity, somehow; and that is where I will leave this book review.

2022-11-14 16:41