Pious Gold

The Complete Stories by Flannery O'Connor


My rating: 5 of 5 stars
O'Connor is literary "shock and awe" in the best sense of the metaphor. She pitted herself against what she called "pious trash." She is also one of the best anti-dotes to trashy-trash nihilism that I know of.

She writes so convincingly about what biographer Ralph Wood calls "the Christ-haunted South." The characters are almost tangible to the imagination. As I read I became convinced that I knew people like this whether it was true or not. This happened especially while reading "The Displaced Person" and "Greenleaf."

O'Connor is shocking and redemptive at the same time. Read "A Good Man Is Hard to Find," "Revelation," and especially "The Artificial Nigger." The latter is one of the most profound stories, short or long, that I've read. "Parker's Back" is lightly allegorical about the love/hate relationship between Catholicism and a kind of Protestant evangelicalism. The former is ignorant of itself but down to earth, the latter knows what it believes but is, at the same time, impoverished by those beliefs.

"Good Country People" is a critique of naive nihilism by a coherent nihilism: "You ain't so smart. I been believing in nothing ever since I was born." Self-righteousness is a constant theme that she crushes in her narrative crucible, especially in "Revelation." Many of her stories resonate with Jesus' parable of the "Pharisee and the Tax Collector." "A Good Man Is Hard to Find" is O'Connor at her theological best. The Misfit knows that without God there is no final justice and "Jesus was the only One that ever raised the dead ... and If He did what he said, then it's nothing for you to do but throw away everything and follow Him, and if He didn't ... No pleasure but meanness."

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