Some time ago a pretty girl in my work told me she liked Flannery O'Connor. I got a copy of her Complete Stories from my university's library and read near enough all of it, but as I was spending the summer avoiding writing my master's dissertation I never finished it. Despite this I bought the book anyway, and finished it today. Unlike previous collections of short fiction like Fitzgerald or Munro which I whizz through in about two hours this one is large and has lots of stories in it which I think contributed to my taking some time to finish it. But then when I read Blood Meridian recently I went through it in stages and found it easy to follow, which is at odds with my usual approach to books. I have to read them as quickly and in as few sittings as possible otherwise I forget everything that's happened. Not that any of this is relevant when the longest story is ~40 pages, mind you.
So, carrying the dedication of Winner of the Best of the National Book Awards Fiction and with testimony to its quality from luminaries such as Dean Koontz, V.S. Pritchett, the New York Times and the Times Literary Supplement we enter a comprehensive collection of all the short stories O'Connor wrote. Two collections and an assortment of unpublished titles are combined, and as I'm pretty sure I wrote when reviewing Munro I'm unable to consider short stories from any perspective besides comparing them to Fitzgerald's. So to go from the high life of the Jazz Age to the grim reality of the rural south, it's quite the jump. Yet throughout nearly all of these stories there is the same unerring humanity, a certainty that what you're reading, however surreal, is genuine, sincere and accurately reflective of the society which inspired them.
Surreal maybe isn't the right word. There's a lot of stories where through some contrived series of events a person who believes themselves to be of a high moral or social standing is challenged somehow. They're undermined throughout to the audience but never in a condescending way, then something happens and most of the time it's the reader left trying to make sense of the events. There's usually a conflict between, I don't want to call them ignorant, but someone firmly entrenched in the southern location and the prevailing way of thinking and an outsider. Often the outsider is someone either educated or apparently more enlightened, often a relative who's been away and come home to be appalled by the conditions in which they grew up. Sometimes one side has their world altered, sometimes the other, sometimes both.
Even in stories where this payoff comes within the last paragraph (such as A Good Man is Hard to Find or The Comforts of Home, two titles which even suggest the clash between values present) there's a consistent ability shown by O'Connor to draw you in to what you read, as if the descriptions of the people and their lives is as stupefying to you as it is to them. Twenty-odd pages of something regular before a twist at the end which comes and goes so quickly you barely realise it was there at all. And I think that's supposed to be the point. Any society which has a certainty in its righteousness, religious or otherwise, is never going to quickly adapt to and consider that any outside perspective is worth considering, and the people depicted are so convincing that this same thing happens to you. This is done to great effect in multiple stories and never gets boring or repetitive.
As you might expect from something set in America in the mid 1900s the issue of race is often at the forefront of the stories. Certainly it's not every day I read a sentence where someone ponders what they would do if Jesus told them they could be reborn as a Racial Slur or as white-trash. Although the majority of the black people featured are the classic, naive, slow, lazy farm workers they, much like the characters central to the stories - are at once genuine yet not-exploited, explored but not mocked. I'll always quite happily make excuses for depictions of outdated social conventions belonging to a certain time as being, well, that, but there's nothing especially unsettling about the way race is handled throughout these stories.
This brings me to what I really wanted to talk about instead of trying to praise these stories through technical details. While I admire Fitzgerald's short and long fiction so much for retaining a consistent, believable and sympathetic representation of humanity regardless of their surroundings which remains true a century later I admire, or appreciate, O'Connor for much the same reason. It's horrifying to read these stories and characters from a world which seems so old and which seems like something belonging to a different civilisation but which patently still dominates so much of western culture today. The ignorance, the unwillingness to deviate from a single viewpoint regardless of the destruction on an individual and wider level. It's never-ending. Every story is distinctly of its time yet feels as if it could have been written last week. I'm not sure if this says more about the stories or about the world as it is today.
If I went into detail about each story and how they do this I'd be here forever but they're all inherently readable and all worth reading. Even the earlier ones that maybe aren't as fully realised as the others are still interesting. The one way I'd try to sum them up if I had to is that while each story is largely set in the same place and focused on similar themes/characters they all feel distinct from one another. Certainly when you read them all together like this you can see the development in O'Connor's ability as a writer, which is a nice touch. I'd like to say the same can be said for Faber & Faber's printing abilities but towards the end I started noticing mis-prints. Letters missing from words. Embarrassing. But definitely worth persisting through.
Incidentally, the girl left last week and I'm not taking it well and probably won't for a number of years.
