Comeuppance for the Rising
Flannery O'Connor holds a distinctive place within the canon of American writers, not only as a woman, but as a southerner, who crafted stories of bitter reality encased within humor and horror. Famously known for the violence depicted in her fiction, O'Connor used violence as a means to shock, and never shied away from any means of accomplishing that. She also never shied away from exposing the hypocrisy that existed within people and their beliefs.
"Everything That Rises Must Converge" is a collection of nine short stories that were published after O'Connor's death. She had hoped to craft a third novel, but never got further than the first chapter. Included in this collection are some gruesome tales, as well as some that are lighter in tone. All of them are examinations of disintegrating family relationships mixed with some heavy soul searching in a changing world. The title story is an examination of bigotry and stereotypes, as a son takes pleasure in seeing his mother learn that class stations may no longer exist within society. "Greenleaf" and "A View of the Woods" are two stories with particularly unsettling endings that depict the old generation's struggle over what to leave to their undeserving heirs. My particular favorite from this collection is "The Lame Shall Enter First", about a widower who is so conscientious of saving a juvenile delinquent that he neglects his own son with dire consequences.
The works of Flannery O'Connor are definitely not for the weak at heart. Her stories, while definitely confined to time and place, are timeless examinations of people and their prejudices. She was a master at weaving images into existence and delivering justice, however shocking or strange. "Everything That Rises Must Converge" is just as great an example of O'Connor's genius as her more famous collection "A Good Man is Hard to Find".
Devastingly Brilliant
Flannery O'Connor (1925 - 1964) was a Southern writer and a Catholic writer, the former obvious if you have only read one or two of her stories excerpted in an anthology, the latter apparent as you read a full collection of stories or a novel. EVERYTHING THAT RISES MUST CONVERGE is her last collection of short fiction. It is strong and revealing of her considerable talents and themes. The stories included are the title fiction, as well as "Greenleaf," "A View of the Woods," "The Enduring Chill," "The Comforts of Home," "The Lame Shall Enter First," "Revelation," "Parker's Back" and "Judgement (sic) Day."
The title story sets the beat for those that follow. In the mid 20th century, O'Connor finds a south that is still coming to terms with the Civil War and on top of that must deal with the new social imperatives brought on by the civil rights movement. The characters in conflict are often parents and children, one usually trying to preserve the once known world, the other trying to accommodate the new social order and progress, neither ever getting it right. In fact, they often get it so wrong as to the point of tragic loss. Her stories swoop with human comedy and high tragedy in pursuit of a moral vision. There is often incredible violence.
First and foremost about her stories is that they are so very readable. Characters are deftly sketched, her narrative voice is straightforward. Her plots are sturdily built. And if the stories are variations on similar characters, themes, conflicts and consequences, each is remarkably distinct, its own entity. The critical introduction to this edition is by a longtime friend of O'Connor's, Robert Fitzgerald, who provides biographical context.
"Strangers"
Most of the stories in this wonderful collection turn on a recurrent conflict, the war between parents and their own children. In this, the titular story is representative; a bratty child with what could be called a Northern higher education is pitted against a Southern parent distinguished by finer, older manners, but racism as well.
O'Connor's treatment of this theme is both hilarious and sad. With wit and delicacy, she exposes "the people gap," that funny but frightening separation even of those persons presumed to share great intimacy. Her vision in this regard coincides with the witty paradox of George Bernard Shaw who famously declared, "There are no greater strangers than parents and their own children."
You Must Read Flannery O'Connor
I confess I had never heard of Flannery O'Connor until recently perusing a list of National Book Award winners (for her posthumous 1972 collection, 'The Complete Stories'). I wasn't even sure if Flannery was a man or a woman, American or Irish. After reading just one of her short stories I became a devoted follower.
Flannery O'Connor is one of great American writers of the 20th century, a Southern Gothic stylist of the first order.
O'Connor sets her stories in the rural South and populates them with twisted characters - this is not the imagined noble, glorious, and chivalric South, but rather the real South of the poor and middling whites of the 1950's (race is mostly in the background). She catches the nuances of human behavior. Her stories have powerful, unexpected and disturbing endings.
Pick up a story and read just one paragraph and you will be hooked.
"Asbury's train stopped so that he would get off exactly where his mother was standing waiting to meet him. Her thin spectacled face below him was bright with a wide smile that disappeared as she caught sight of him bracing himself behind the conductor. The smile vanished so suddenly, the shocked look that replaced it was so complete, that he realized for the first time that he must look as ill as he was..."
Absolutely the highest recommendation.
"Floundering around in the thoughts of various unsavory characters."
For her first collection of stories ("A Good Man Is Hard to Find"), O'Connor gathered an assortment that had been previously published in magazines; the result was a fascinating, but unsystematic, potpourri of experimentation and originality. As she prepared the stories for "Everything That Rise Must Converge," however, she instead developed each selection under a thematic framework. (Only the last two stories, which were literally rushed to completion as she lay on her deathbed, seem to stand a bit apart.) The collection as a whole, even more than her previous fiction, emphasizes the absurdities and monstrosities of everyday life and the tension between the demands of the self and the mystery of the divine presence.
One of O'Connor's primary mentors for her approach to fiction was, surprisingly, James Joyce (and, specifically, "Dubliners"), and his influence is nowhere more obvious than in this book. In one story ("The Enduring Chill"), she pokes fun at Joyce's worldview in an exchange between an artist and a priest. She was surely alienated by Joyce's un-Catholic sentiments, but she acknowledged his influence in her essay "The Nature and Aim of Fiction": "The major difference between the novel as written in the eighteenth century and the novel as we usually find it today is the disappearance from it of the author. . . . By the time we get to James Joyce, the author is nowhere to be found in the book. The reader is on his own, floundering around in the thoughts of various unsavory characters."
"Unsavory characters" are, without doubt, O'Connor's specialty. Yet, is O'Connor effectively able to remove herself from her narratives? Do the stories in this collection succeed, as she intended, as a thematically linked sequence? And, aside from her stated literary goals, are these stories really that good?
Well, on the first two counts, the results are mixed. In spite of her intentions, O'Connor's presence crowds several of these stories. In "The Lame Shall Enter First" (my own favorite), a vague didacticism is obvious both in O'Connor's not-very-subtle manipulation of events and in the story's portrayals of the juvenile delinquent Rufus Johnson and his mentor Sheppard, a Good Samaritan wannabe. Yet O'Connor steps back just enough to allow the story itself to convey the depth of Sheppard's moral collapse. The less successful "Parker's Back" (one of the deathbed stories) concerns a "trailer trash" husband who, much to his wife's dismay, gets a tattoo of Jesus Christ inked on his back. It's one of O'Connor's more brilliant scenarios, but the psychological sermonizing of the omniscient narrator is a bit heavy-handed. The author is everywhere to be found in this story.
As for the collection's coherence: O'Connor moral vision is certainly more easily discernible in this book than in any of her previous works. But, like the "Lives of the Saints" she so cherished, O'Connor's hagiography of sinners, read back to back, occasionally suffers from a certain formulaic uniformity and predictability. Still, each story, enjoyed at random on its own, has the potential for being your "favorite O'Connor story"-and it's hard to find two readers who will agree on which stories in this collection are best. As a collection, then, it's a bit tame. Individually, however, the stories really are that good.
Throughout her career, O'Connor invented a gallery of memorable reprobates and unlikely prophets. Whether read separately or as a cycle, these nine stories add much to her unique legacy. And the collection will also help clear the air for readers (like me) who had always been enchanted by O'Connor's works of fiction but perplexed by critics who stress their theological and symbolic underpinnings.
(19 reviews)
