Flannery O’Connor’s Why Do The Heathen Rage, Jessica Hooten Wilson with illustrations by Steve Prince. Brazos Press (ISBN: 9781587436185), 2024.

Summary: The text of O’Connor’s unfinished work with commentary on her literary process and the tensions she wrestled with in writing.

Flannery O’Connor died in 1964 from lupus at the young age of 39. Despite her illness she penned a number of short stories and two novels. She also wrote numerous letters, essays, and reviews. She was working on a third novel at the time of her death, a fact known mostly among O’Connor scholars. But none dared put the fragments of this novel into print until now. Jessica Hooten Wilson describes how she was a fan of O’Connor since her teen years. During her doctoral research on O’Connor and Dostoevsky, a friend encouraged her to look at the unpublished novel as the most Dostoevskian of O’Connor’s works. This began research that culminated in this work.

In this work, Wilson has arranged the fragments of the novel into something of a coherent narrative. Between fragments she offers her commentary on the work, O’Connor’s process, and the literary influences on the text, and her struggle to complete it. Portions of the novel are introduced by woodcut illustrations by Steve Prince of One Fish Studios. He provides an afterword describing his work with the O’Connor text.

The principle characters of the story are Walter Grandstaff Tilman, a scholar who spends his days writing letters to all and sundry between bouts of illness (shades of O’Connor’s own life?). His father, T.C. Tilman, is nominal head of the family but has suffered a stroke, and is tended by Roosevelt. His mother keeps up the slowly fading farm, directing the efforts of the farm help. She is frustrated but has come to accept Walter’s lack of interest in the farm.

Oona Gibbs is the one other character who plays a significant part. She is a civil rights activist. She lives with a domineering mother and one gets the sense that her correspondence and activism is part of her liberation. Walter begins corresponding with her. He tells her about his life but portrays himself as lack. Too late he realizes the consequence of his deception. Her interest awakened, she wants to visit. To avert the visit, he writes asking her not to come, trying to end the relationship. Too late. She is on her way.

Wilson takes liberty with what O’Connor wrote in the final part, fashioning a crisis and conclusion of sorts from a cross-burning scene on a neighbor’s farm. Wilson borrows scenes from other stories and acknowledges this as presumptuous. To me, it seemed an effort to offer some kind of closure to what was plainly unfinished and unsatisfying. While it would have busied up the text, I wish she would have annotated this chapter: what was from Why Do the Heathen Rage, what came from other works, and what was Wilson.

Wilson interleaves commentary with the fragments of O’Connor’s work. She traces the different iterations of the story, including the name changes Asbury/Walter and his different backstories. Speaking of backstories, Wilson introduces us to the friendship of O’Connor with Maryat Lee, a New York playwright. Lee, a polar opposite to O’Connor, is the likely inspiration for Oona Gibbs, with shades of Ivan Karamazov.

Wilson’s commentary also explores O’Connor’s wrestling with race. She contends that this, as much as illness, helps account for O’Connor’s inability, despite three years of work, to fashion and finish a coherent novel. She notes the plot elements of Roosevelt, Walter’s conflicted choice to write as a Black, and Oona’s activism, as well as the closing scene as part of O’Connor’s struggle. Wilson discusses O’Connor’s segregated life, her blind spots of experience, and a bifurcated spirituality that relegated civil rights to an “earthly and political position.” Yet she sees the novel as an attempt to address the racism of the South.

For Wilson, the unfinished novel represents the unfinished racial awakening in O’Connor’s life. But how ought we evaluate this unfinished story? On one hand, O’Connor fans will revel in new material to read. On the other hand, despite Wilson’s efforts, O’Connor’s text is fragmentary and lacks cohesion. Given all this, the book is one for O’Connor scholars and devotees. For me, as one who has read O’Connor on and off since college, it added to my appreciation of this complicated Southern Catholic writer. And I grieved afresh that she died so young.

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Disclosure of Material Connection: I received a complimentary copy of this book from the publisher via LibraryThing’s Early Reviewers Program for review.