Reviews and News:

Flannery O’Connor’s “vision”: “This spring I reread ‘A Good Man Is Hard to Find’ with students in an introductory literature course at the United States Military Academy, where I teach. To my great surprise, only two plebes—as freshmen at West Point are called—out of maybe fifty or so had encountered O’Connor in high school. The jury was out on her stories: many of those who liked “A Good Man Is Hard to Find” (a violent and funny story) disliked ‘The River’ (a violent and sad story), and vice versa. Some cadets saw the stories’ significance come into focus when we looked for religious themes; others lacked a frame of reference to understand what is at stake in baptism, say, or redemption at the eleventh hour. But they did, almost to a cadet, admire O’Connor’s descriptions: the mean trees sparkling, a woman’s face ‘as broad and innocent as a cabbage,’ the oversize peppermint stick that unnervingly cues us into the demonic and pedophilic nature of the piglike Mr. Paradise. ‘I see it,’ said one cadet, a football player, about the cabbage face, as I recall. ‘Good,’ I replied. ‘That’s exactly what O’Connor wanted you to do.’ And it’s true. Her vivid descriptions are carefully crafted to pull off exactly that magic trick of fiction: to replicate or recreate an image originating in one person’s mind (the writer’s) in the mind of another person (the reader). In her fiction, O’Connor deliberately tried to alter her readers’ perception, to get them to notice what she called the ‘distortions’ of modern life and to look at the created world closely enough that they might perceive in its depths proof of a creator. For secular audiences, she saw little point in subtlety, famously explaining her grotesque style in this way: ‘To the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost blind you draw large and startling figures.'”