Can anyone here help me understand Flannery O'Connor?

[empther]

I’ve decided to revisit Flannery O’Connor and see what I missed when I was 16!

Tell me what you read and what you thought about it.
I do want to read her, but on the assumption that every author has a masterpiece and several ho-hums,** ( *** )** I want to read the best.
Something else nobody has said. Which was her best work?

** ( *** I read Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice** a couple of times and it was good. Then I tried her Sense and Sensibility and it was far less interesting. Don’t really remember much about it. Recently I checked out her Emma from the library and fortunately I didn’t buy a copy. Terrible! Seemed to have no point at all. I gave up halfway through. )

 

[GEddie]

You are going to dismiss one of the greatest writers in history, certainly one of the best Catholic ones, who might possibly be declared a Saint one day, because she didn’t like to kill a mockingbird and her stories might not be from a Disney movie?

I’m sorry but that seems a little silly.

Flannery O’ Connor named a saint? Never heard of that before.

ICXC NIKA

 

[didymus]

I just finished FOC’s stories. Yes, no they are not happy stories but they describe a certain place and time. They are also heavy on the theme of human imperfectibility.

One that struck me was “D. P.” about a Polish family hired to work on a farm who has no understanding of local race/class divisions. He tries to make the blacks work hard and catches one stealing. It is explained to him that this is all expected.

I’m afraid I forget title of another about a woman visiting a doctor’s office who sizes up everybody there by class and family history; blacks of course are on the bottom, white trash just above, white home and landowners on top but things are a little complicated because there are blacks who own homes and property. She isn’t hateful really, this is just how she sees the world.

The most poignant is about a recently widowed school counselor who tries to turn around a juvenile delinquent to the neglect of his own son. The delinquent mocks the counselor’s efforts to save him and I think it’s really about our rejection of God’s grace.

I would classify her work as almost “Southern gothic”.

 

[didymus]

from an article by George Weigel:

Asked why there were so many grotesques in her fiction, Flannery O’Connor, who could be tart, responded that, in the South, “we like to think we can still recognize them.” Thus the southern sensibility she shared with writers like Walker Percy and Shelby Foote worked in tandem with her sacramentally-based Catholic realism: the South, the part of America that knew defeat and had in a certain cultural sense been formed by defeat, was instinctively realistic rather than pie-in-the-sky romantic. Mix the Catholic part of Flannery O’Connor with her Georgia roots and life, and the result was a high octane literary cocktail—too bracingly realistic for some tastes, but widely recognized by serious readers and critics as something unique and brilliant in American literature.