I enjoyed Flannery O’Connor’s short story collection more than any other story collection I’ve ever read. Not only is there an almost unrivaled moral depth to her stories, but she wrote with exceeding technical precision. From her very first story, The Geranium, she shows an amazing ability to write sentences:

“Once she took him shopping with her but he was too slow. They went in a “subway”---a railroad underneath the ground like a big cave. People boiled out of trains and up steps and over into the streets. They rolled off the street and down steps and into trains—black and white and yellow all mixed up like vegetables in soup. Everything was boiling. The trains swished in from tunnels, up canals, and all of a sudden stopped.”

Great writing. The kind some writers can never achieve consistently. The cool thing about reading her Collected Stories is that I got every story she wrote in the order she wrote them. Over the course of the collection she goes from a writer with great technical skill and some interesting ideas to a writer with flawless technical precision and an ability to fully encapsulate these intractable moral issues—the inevitable mix-up of liberal do-gooding and condescension, the lost world of the antebellum South—in each and every story. She gets noticeably better right after Enoch and the Gorilla, when she took some time off of short stories to write Wise Blood. It was by writing that novel that she mastered fiction. Her first short story back is A Good Man is Hard to Find. Every story she writes after that is pretty much of equal quality.

Another interesting thing is that she deals with the same ideas through her entire career. Her first story and last story are literally the same story but with an extra revision. The Barber, a story she wrote in Grad school and apparently hated (it was only published posthumously with a note from her executor saying as much) deals with the same question of liberal condescension as The Lame Shall Enter First, The Enduring Chill, et cetera. She did not find new topics as she grew as a writer; she just got better at writing about the ideas she had always wanted to express.

She is also a very funny writer, when she wants to be. The story The Partridge Festival is one of the most darkly humorous pieces of writing I’ve ever encountered. It’s about these two social outcasts who find each other in this very traditional Southern town, their commonalities being that they hate the establishment and the backwards tradition in their town and thus both identify with a man who has committed an act of mass murder and is locked up in a local asylum. They both project their own very philosophical, intellectualized anger towards the town onto this mass killer. Of course they also hate each other, because they are each also attached to the idea that it is only themselves who can recognize the rottenness of the place they live. Their conversation is wonderfully written:
"'It’s quite simple,” the girl said. 'He was the scapegoat. While Partridge flings itself about selecting Miss Patridge Azalea, Singleton suffers at Quincy. He expiates..'

'I don’t mean your abstract findings,' the boy said. 'I mean your concrete findings. Have you ever seen him? What did he look like? The novelist is not interested in narrow abstractions—particularly when they’re obvious. He’s..'

'How many novels have you written?' she asked.

'This will be my first,” he said coldly. “Have you ever seen him?'"

And like that they goad each other into visiting the killer. They have so built up this idea of him in their heads that they bring him a copy of Thus Spake Zarathustra and Revolt of the Masses. Anyway, I won’t give the story away, but the mass killer turns out not to be who they have construed him to be.

Bottom line: read Flannery O’Connor. She’s great. To finish, another passage, probably my favorite from the entire collection (from Greenleaf):

She had had Mr. Greenleaf fifteen years but no one else would have had him for five minutes. Just the way he approached an object was enough to tell anybody what kind of worker he was. He walked with a high-shouldered creep and he never appeared to come directly forward. He walked on the perimeter of some invisible circle and if you wanted to look him in the face, you had to move and get in front of him…he never told her about a sick cow until it was too late to call the veterinarian and if her barn had caught on fire, he would have called his wife to see the flames before he began to put them out. And of the wife, she didn’t even like to think. Beside the wife, Mr. Greenleaf was an aristocrat.

Flannery O'Connor Complete Stories

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