The Complete Short Stories, by Flannery O'Connor

Flannery O’Connor took as her canvas the Southern milieu she grew up in and observed. Her short stories are thronged with gritty eccentrics and bizarre situations that are true to life, as they are too uncanny to have been invented. She adds to this mix a perfect ear for dialogue and a deeply ironic worldview, making her fiction often laugh-out-loud funny. Her complete stories don’t contain a lacklustre one in the whole book.

Flannery O’Connor (1925-1964) died young, at thirty-nine, and managed to publish two novels during her short life, Wise Blood (1952) and The Violent Bear it Away (1960). She was also a short story writer of immense perception and intellect. Born in Savannah, Georgia, and educated at Georgia State College for Women, her work is heavily influenced by her Southern upbringing and culture. The language, characters, beliefs and eccentricities of her native South are carefully detailed in a fiction that is strikingly alive. O’Connor’s Roman Catholic faith forms another major component of her work, giving her novels and stories many violent climactic scenes and raw, no-nonsense characters.

Flannery O’Connor’s style is deeply ironic and often outright funny. She wields a wicked sense of humour that is never used at the expense of her characters, but more pokes fun at the absurdity of the world. While the reader may often laugh at the dumbly racist characters in her stories and novels, the joke is never on the simple Southern folk she observed with such accuracy. If anything, her criticism is directed at the do-gooder, educated characters who try to lord it over the bigoted and gullible.

The Collected Short Stories comprises youthful pieces composed while the writer was a student, stories written as the opening chapters of her novels Wise Blood and The Violent Bear it Away, and the mature work of her later career. They are organised chronologically, so the reader can get an understanding of how O’Connor developed her short story style. All of the early pieces such as ‘The Geranium’ and ‘The Barber’ are of a remarkably high quality, and don’t read as the work of a literary novice. For those who have read Wise Blood, it may be a little frustrating to read the early chapters of this novel worked out as a series of short stories.

The strongest stories perhaps come from the middle section, such as ‘A Good Man is Hard to Find’ and ‘A Late Encounter with the Enemy’. These stories frequently show O’Connor’s dark humour and taste for the ludicrous at its best. This reviewer frequently found himself laughing out loud at the sharp dialogue and ridiculous situations.

The later stories in the collection are not as humorous, and introduce more educated characters and the friction that develops when they try to change their more simple-minded relatives or racist compatriots. This is especially so in O’Connor’s brilliant ‘Everything that Rises Must Converge’, a story that highlights the hypocrisy and cruelty of the educated liberal.

It’s hard to pin down what Flannery O’Connor’s themes are as a writer. She mixes comedy, irony, violent religious feeling and authentic characterisations of the people she observed and grew up with in Southern Georgia. Her ear for dialogue and gift for evocative description make her fiction fresh and alive today, over fifty years after it was first written. She seems determined to paint people as they really are, warts and all, yet doesn’t look down her nose at the racists, blasphemers and fools that drive the action of her stories. She sees the human side above all else, and can sympathise with people who are bad. Like the mother in ‘Everything That Rises Must Converge’ who condescendingly thinks black children are ‘cute’, but baulks at any type of integration.

The cultural landscape in Flannery O’Connor’s stories is bleak, full of hucksters, racists, cheap entertainment and misguided values. What the reader takes away is a raw picture of the American South, of life stripped back with little in the way of spiritual nourishment. Religious salvation or escape from such a desolate landscape is always violent and extreme. When life’s profound ironies are examined by O’Connor’s shrewd intellect, the only response is a kind of laughter in the dark.

The Complete Short Stories, by Flannery O’Connor. Published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. ISBN: 978-0374515362