Flannery O’Connor

The Weekly Wrap: March 23-29

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Becoming Real

An image of some tattered old books brought to mind this quote from The Velveteen Rabbit: on how one becomes Real:

“It doesn’t happen all at once,” said the Skin Horse. “You become. It takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.”

We often take what it means for stuffed animals to become Real and apply it to people. Hair, eyes, joints, shabbiness–by those tokens I’m becoming more real all the time! Much of this for stuffed animals comes down to being beloved companions. And I suspect that whatever “Realness” there is in me could not be apart from my wife and other loving companions.

But I mentioned books. Certainly they are already real, tangible objects. However there are books with many words on many pages that sit on my shelves that are little more than that. Then again, other books have become “Real” to me. I’ve come to live in Middle-earth, the ancient biblical world, “The Road Not Taken.” Most of the works of C.S. Lewis are “Real.” The pages are yellowed and marked up, the cover worn and curled.

The richness of reading consists at least in part of those books that become Real for us. One reading is not enough. But during first readings, we hear the book’s invitation. And something inside us answers, “I want to know you better.” You know a book has become real when it filters into your conversation. You describe a particularly hospitable home as like Rivendell. Or you refer to those times of encountering the Transcendent that changed you as “burning bushes.”

Do you have books that have become real? If not, are there books that resonated deeply whose invitation to know them better you’ve yet to heed. In answering that call, not only will some books become Real. You will as well.

Five Articles Worth Reading

One of the most “Real” writers I’ve encountered is Flannery O’Connor. This week marked the centennial of her birth. “The Immanent Grace of Flannery O’Connor” offers a glimpse into her insights into both our humanness and the grace we need.

This year also marks the hundredth anniversary of the publication of The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitgerald. A.O. Scott, in a visual piece, “It’s Gatsby’s World, We Just Live in It“,” portrays how Gatsby turns up everywhere from Seinfeld to Peanuts.

It’s only been forty years since Neil Postman published a somewhat academic book title Amusing Ourselves to Death. It became Real for me because of its explanatory power. “Still Amusing Ourselves” explores why this book continues to have “legs.”

The idea of citizenship has come up quite a bit in our recent political discourse. “Eight Books About the Complicated History of U.S. Citizenship” offers a crash course on its often contended history.

By the way, Citizen by Claudia Rankine was ranked number one in the Atlantic’s “The Best American Poetry of the 21st Century (So Far).” Looking for contemporary poetry to read? This is a list of twenty-five collections you might look for.

Quote of the Week

As I noted above, March 25 marked the centennial of Flannery O’Connor’s birth in 1925. Here’s a quote in which she “keeps it real”:

“I don’t deserve any credit for turning the other cheek as my tongue is always in it.”

Miscellaneous Musings

Robin Wall Kimmerer’s little book, The Serviceberry is a ray of sunshine amid trade wars and sinking stocks. She writes of a different economy–one of generosity, abundance, and reciprocity–in short, a gift economy. One of the reasons I’ve never tried to monetize this blog or any other platform is that I receive so much from books (and the publishers who send them) that it just makes sense to pass along the gifts.

I wonder if a seed of much of our discontent is that we have not learned the meaning of “enough.” We want more and more (which we then have to figure out how to get rid of), we build economies around never having enough, and of late, in the U.S. have taken to thinking that this great land we call our national home is not enough. I think this will end very badly, and we will never be content so long as we live this way.

But I continue to be grateful for the fine writing of William Kent Krueger. I just began Vermilion Drift. Not only does he portray a middle-aged man dealing with loss as children move away (among other losses) as well as the fate of aging mining towns. It doesn’t hurt that his stories are page-turners as well.

Next Week’s Reviews

Monday: Han Kang, We Do Not Part

Tuesday: The Month in Reviews: March 2025

Wednesday: Todd C. Ream et al, Habits of Hope

Thursday: Michael F. Bird, Religious Freedom in a Secular Age

Friday: Robin Wall Kimmerer, The Serviceberry

So, that’s The Weekly Wrap for March 23-29, 2025!

Find past editions of The Weekly Wrap under The Weekly Wrap heading on this page

The Weekly Wrap: December 29-January 4

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woman in white crew neck t shirt in a bookstore wrapping books
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Reading Goals

I’ve observed there are two kinds of bibliophiles. Obviously, both types love to read. And usually, both read lots of books. But one type enjoys setting goals for themselves from pages and books read, to reading particular types of books. Meanwhile, the other type just likes to read, going where their whims take them. Personally, I don’t think there is anything wrong with being either type. After all, we’re reading when much of the world isn’t!

I tend toward the goal setters, not only in books but in other things. Goals stretch me and help me grow and I’ve lived long enough to be realistic. And they are my goals–not someone else’s.

I sign up for the Goodreads Reading Challenge every year. I set it below what I read the past year, but a little more than last year’s goal. Over time, my goals exceed what I once read, but are well within reach for me–so I don’t stress.

But the goals that matter are what make me a better reader. Probably a big one for me this year is to read with greater attention–probably to compensate for my diminishing brain cells. Probably the two things I want to work on is to not mix reading and phones. The other is to get enough sleep so that I am not reading tired.

I’d like to take at least minimal notes on more challenging books–perhaps outlining an argument for example. I might start with one or a few books. I usually don’t take written notes, just mentally reviewing as I go along.

Another thing I want to do is re-read at one book that has been significant to me in the past. The occupational hazard of reviewing is having so many new books to read. Perhaps I’ll even try for a fiction work and a non-fiction work.

Finally, I’ve been reading more poetry. I have collections of poetry of Donne, Dickinson, Sandburg, Eliot, and Langston Hughes among others. I want to read slowly through at least one of these.

Every year, I post a “reading challenge.” This year’s will go up on Monday. No doubt, some of this will be there and some others. And I’d love to hear about your reading goals!

Five Articles Worth Reading

We lost Jimmy Carter this past week, our longest-lived president, at 100. Numerous tributes have appeared about his humanitarian efforts. He was also a prolific author, publishing 32 books. “Jimmy Carter: Poet, Novelist, Memoirist, Philosopher” celebrates his literary legacy.

In 1988, Kurt Vonnegut, wrote a letter for people in 2088. Benedict Cumberbatch gives us an early preview in “Benedict Cumberbatch Reads Kurt Vonnegut’s Letter of Advice to People Living in the Year 2088.” It’s a profound letter and well-read.

Speaking of letters, Cynthia Ozick, in “Voices from the Dead Letter Office” reflects on what we’ve lost with the end of letter-writing.

Ever since my freshman year, when I read one of the coillections of Flannery O’;Connor’s short stories, I’ve been both perplexed and fascinated by her writing. I totally missed Wildcat, a film exploring her life through the lens of the period when she learned that she, like her father, was suffering from lupus, a disease that would claim both of their lives. In “The Peacock’s Tail,” Jeff Reimer reflects on the movie and the connection between O’Connor’s suffering and creativity.

Several years ago, it seemed everywhere I looked, I encountered articles about the New Atheists. Now, increasingly, I’m reading of intellectuals who are coming to faith, like historian Niall Ferguson, who recently converted from atheism to Anglican Christianity. In “How Intellectuals Found God” Peter Savodnik chronicles this trend. The professions of some may surprise you and I think for any of us, the test is “by their fruit you will know them.” But it’s a fascinating account.

Quote of the Week

J.R.R. Tolkien was born on January 3, 1892. We would do well, I think, to follow this advice from him:

“If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world.”

Miscellaneous Musings

Jimmy Carter was not only a prolific author, but like many of our presidents, a prodigious reader. I enjoyed “In His Reading Life, Jimmy Carter Favored ‘Anything but Politics’” in this week’s New York Times. It’s hard to make excuses about finding time to read when we read of people like him!

I’m reading Tom Lake by Ann Patchett. I’ve admired her writing but not always the endings of her books. I thought The Dutch House got it right. Hoping for two in a row. Watch for my review!

Goodreads has tweaked its Reading Challenge this year to include integration with Kindles and monthly reading challenges, cumulative challenges, and community challenges. The monthly challenge is a pretty low bar–finish one book each month–but 12 books is more than many Americans read.

Next Week’s Reviews

Monday: Bob on Books 2025 Reading Challenge

Tuesday: David W. Swanson, Plundered: The Tangled Roots of Racial and Environmental Injustice

Wednesday: Amy Tan, The Backyard Bird Chronicles

Thursday: Ellis Peters, Brother Cadfael’s Penance

Friday: Rachel B. Griffis, Julie Ooms, and Rachel M. De Smith Roberts, Deep Reading

Well, that’s The Weekly Wrap for December 29, 2024-January 4, 2025!

Find past editions of The Weekly Wrap under The Weekly Wrap heading on this page.

Review: Flannery O’Connor’s Why Do the Heathen Rage?

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Cover image of "Flannery O'Connor's Why Do The Heathen Rage" by Jessica Hooten Wilson

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.

Review: A Subversive Gospel

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A Subversive Gospel

A Subversive Gospel (Studies in Theology and the Arts), Michael Mears Bruner. Downers Grove: InterVarsity Academic, 2017.

Summary: Proposes that the grotesque and violent character of Flannery O’Connor’s work reflects her understanding of the subversive character of the gospel and the challenge of awakening people in the Christ-haunted South to the beauty, goodness, and truth of the gospel.

A number of years ago our book group decided to read the collected works of Flannery O’Connor. It was a challenge. The stories involved everything from a stolen wooden leg to a rape to the murder of a whole family. The word “grotesque” is often used to describe her work. The question arises, why did this single Catholic woman, who lived on her parents’ farm in Milledgeville, Georgia, suffering and ultimately dying of lupus, write such strange stories?

Michael Mears Bruner explores this question in his contribution to the Studies in Theology and the Arts series.  His discussion focuses particularly around the novel The Violent Bear It Away (an allusion to Matthew 11:12 in the Douay-Rheims version) and a statement about the main character, Francis Tarwater, about whom O’Connor says:

“His black pupils, glassy and still, reflected depth on depth his own stricken image of himself, trudging into the distance in the bleeding stinking mad shadow of Jesus, until at last he received his reward, a broken fish, a multiplied loaf.”

Bruner’s thesis is “that through the medium of her art, Flannery O’Connor showed her readers how following Christ is a commitment to follow in his shadow, which becomes a subversive act aesthetically (“bleeding”), ethically (“stinking”), and intellectually (“mad”).” Elsewhere, and repeatedly in the text, he refers to the “terrible beauty, violent goodness and foolish truth of God.” Bruner helps us realize that O’Connor writes in a Southern context that has been effectively innoculated against the Christian gospel–grown so comfortable with Christian language that it is impervious to the radical and startling claims of the Christian faith–the beauty of God’s love revealed in suffering, the goodness and righteousness of God revealed in the violent death of Jesus, and the foolishness of a message wiser than human wisdom. The grotesque and the violent in O’Connor’s stories startle us awake to realities to which we’ve grown too accustomed.

Bruner begins with tracing the development of O’Connor’s writing from the earlier to the later works which reflect a theological turn that he attributes to the influence of Baron von Hugel’s thought. He then looks at the moral and theological vision that shapes her work as a Roman Catholic in the fundamentalist south. He connects her dramatic vision with her subversive aesthetic and then goes deeper into how her work subverts the transcendentals of beauty, goodness, and truth. Finally he applies this approach to her last novel, The Violent Bear It Away. A brief conclusion is followed by a liturgical celebration of the Eucharist using O’Connor’s work.

The body of this work consists of dense literary analysis, and it is helpful to have recently read and have a copy of O’Connor’s work handy. In the process, Bruner joins O’Connor in challenging the nostrums and platitudes of Christian faith with the subversive character of O’Connor’s work. One example is this passage:

“Yet this hardly settles the matter regarding the notion that God might indeed be terrible, and so what do we do with this component of O’Connor’s fierce theology? She refuses to placate us with religious euphemisms and spiritual jargon, preferring instead to ‘shout’ and ‘draw large and startling figures” in our faces” (p. 154).

O’Connor wrote to disturb the comfortable, and Bruner demonstrates just how subversive she was in her story writing. He also helps us understand the theological turn in her writing and the influences other critics have noted briefly or not at all. He helps those of us disenchanted with enculturated, saccharine versions of Christianity who ask, “is that all there is?” to see that O’Conner writes out a more bracing vision, one we might even need to brace ourselves against. She defies all our conventions of beauty, goodness, and truth, Bruner argues, because that is what the gospel does. She bids us ask the dangerous question of whether this is in fact the gospel we’ve believed–as dangerous a question as a Flannery O’Connor story.