A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories

I read the first short story in this collection by Flannery O'Connor and sat back, astonished. If you haven't read A Good Man is Hard to Find and Other Stories, grab a copy right now and read the title story. You'll know then exactly where you stand with O'Connor's stories after that first one has slammed into you like a hammer to the back of the head.

In A Good Man is Hard to Find, a family prepares for and sets off for a vacation in Florida. Even Grandma, who has much to say about how much better it would be to visit family in east Tennessee and how the trip might be dangerous, what with escaped felons and other perils, comes along to narrate the ride. And off they go, stopping at bbq joints for lunch and staring at the sights outside show more the car windows. It begins as one sort of story and ends as quite another and it's one of the most brilliant things I've ever read.

Each story is finely honed and reads as surprisingly contemporary, for all it's written about a rural South that is long gone. O'Connor is insightful and cutting and unafraid to allow the worst to happen. There is a dark comedy underlying her work and a deep understanding of people, albeit a somewhat grim one. People in this collection die. They're drowned, or shot, or simple run over. They look into someone else's eyes and see how badly they've misjudged things. They are callous and cruel and lonely and disillusioned. Their hopes are inevitably dashed, usually because of their own flaws. There's so much packed into each of these tightly written stories that each feels like an entire world. show less

Expect the unexpected

I knew the name of the author and title of the story, but nothing more. I assumed it was about trying to find a suitable husband. It’s not!

Before reading this, I learned that O’Connor wrote Southern Gothic, with a Grotesque slant, and that she was a devout Roman Catholic. This story starts with the first and ends with the latter.

From the very first word, it’s clear this is a waspish satire about a somewhat dysfunctional family:
“THE grandmother didn’t want to go to Florida.”
Not “Grandmother”, or “the children’s grandmother”, let alone a name. Then, very soon after, “The children’s mother”. Again, no name, and unlike the grandmother, she doesn't even speak. Such detachment. The show more grandmother lives with her son, his wife, and their three children.

Despite her objections, they go on a roadtrip to Florida. The older two children, John Wesley and June Star, are snarky brats, and the grandmother is a selfish and manipulative snob, anxious to be seen as a good southern lady. It’s a little clichéd but quite amusing, and there’s some careful foreshadowing. As the grandmother pontificates, it becomes clear she has attitudes that fit the time and place:
“‘Oh look at the cute little pickaninny!’ she said and pointed to a Negro child standing in the door of a shack. ‘Wouldn’t that make a picture, now?’”

They stop at a roadside diner, and the grandmother and proprietor reminisce about better times:
“‘A good man is hard to find,’ Red Sammy said. ‘Everything is getting terrible. I remember the day you could go off and leave your screen door unlatched. Not no more.’...
The old lady said that in her opinion Europe was entirely to blame for the way things were now.”

Then there’s a sudden change of setting, tone, and genre: to horror then religion .

Image: The Misfit (spotlight on one stick figure that is unlike the others) (Source)

And the moral is…

I wasn’t really sure, but it sure was preachy, and that’s not my thing. I couldn't decide if O'Connor was highlighting God’s love and forgiveness, exposing the hypocrisy of the desperate, or both. It’s often said that flattery will get you everywhere, but will it get you into heaven?
“I know you’re a good man. You don’t look a bit like you have common blood.”

I found the final three lines the most baffling and they make the story hard to rate, hence a neutral 3*. That fits the symbolic recurrence of the number three in the story, echoing famous Bible passages.

O’Connor explained somewhat in an essay about the element of suspense in the story, HERE. However, I was most struck by the opening words:
“A story really isn't any good unless it successfully resists paraphrase, unless it hangs on and expands the mind.”
On that basis, perhaps I should have awarded it more than 3*.

The following week I read another story of hers that was similar in many ways, but dialled down a little. It seemed an anti-racist story, until I read how O'Connor identified with the protagonist. See my review of Revelation HERE.

Quotes

• “A young woman in slacks, whose face was as broad and innocent as a cabbage and was tied around with a green head-kerchief that had two points on the top like rabbit’s ears.” [innocent cabbage?!]

• “The trees were full of silver-white sunlight and the meanest of them sparkled.”

• “I ain’t a good man… but I ain’t the worst in the world neither.”

Short story club

I read this as one of the stories in The Art of the Short Story, by Dana Gioia, from which I'm aiming to read one story a week with The Short Story Club, starting 2 May 2022.

You can read this story here.

You can join the group here. show less

"Mrs. Hopewell had no bad qualities of her own but she was able to use other people's in such a constructive way that she never felt the lack."

I quite enjoyed this collection of short stories. O'Connor's characters are all so awful that you kind of don't mind watching the story tilt and run off the page. Things will end badly - this is guaranteed. And yet, I can't help wanting to watch it play out, to see how far she will go. There is something about O'Connor's writing that gets under your skin. Ugly stories that reflect ugly truths that are so perfectly delivered that they might surprise a laugh out of you from time to time at the sheer audacity of the dark humor that is allowed to creep in intermittently. I have read that her writing show more and her Catholic faith were intertwined, and yet, there is no mercy here. No kindness. No light. Definitely Southern Gothic and not for everyone, but if you like this type of thing, then highly recommended.

"She would have to be a saint because that was the occupation that included everything you could know; and yet she knew she would never be a saint.... but she thought she could be a martyr if they killed her quick."

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My reactions as I read:

"In case of an accident, anyone seeing her dead on the highway would know at once that she was a lady."

Yes, girl. Always dress like the Doctor will appear and whisk you away!

“In my time,” said the grandmother, folding her thin veined fingers, “children were
more respectful of their native states and their parents and everything else.

Immediately proceeds to NOT practice what she preaches...oof, ick. Exasperating woman.

“Gone With the Wind,” said the grandmother. “Ha. Ha.”

I actually loled at this...snorted more like. Both love and hate grandma...

She was sitting against the side of the red gutted ditch, holding the screaming baby, but she only had a cut down her face and a broken shoulder.

Like it's only show more a flesh wound. What is wrong with this grandma?

"Why you're one of my babies. You're one of my own children!"

Trying to place ourselves above the lowly criminal, I see.

"She would of been a good woman," The Misfit said, "if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life."

PREACH MR. CRIMINAL-MAN, SIR!!!

Ok, racist, petty, self-sentric old lady gets her entire family killed and her own abrupt end because she can't shut her mouth. She views the criminal as "not good" and the criminal views her as "not good." Is "goodness" only in the eyes of the beholder? Is "goodness" purely subjective? Perspective is individual reality. Perception is 9/10ths of the law... show less

Amazingly written and utterly original Southern Gothic short stories. They're simultaneously utterly dark, full of unsympathetic people in dire situations, and yet full of funny and brilliantly observed little comments -
the cantankerous centenarian who "would not wear teeth because he thought his profile was more striking without them";
the seemingly gormless youth selling Bibles door-to-door who finally gets a woman in the hayloft; opening his valise "there were only two Bibles in it. He took one of these and opened the cover of it. It was hollow and contained a pocket flask of whiskey, a pack of cards and a small blue box with printing on it...He put the blue box in her hand. THIS PRODUCT ONLY TO BE USED FOR THE PREVENTION OF DISEASE, show more she read and dropped it."

Intriguing scenarios abound...a family on a roadtrip encounter a serial killer; a child from a bad home goes to the river to re-live the healing that a neighbour took him to see; an old woman tries to marry off her retarded daughter to a drifter; a young wife with a horror of doctors discovers she is pregnant.
Utterly engrossing and very very strange. show less

The New York Times, in a review of O'Connor's stories, referred to her as an American Guy de Maupassant. This is an apt description. O'Connor's stories paint a dark yet spot-on picture of the human condition. She takes the quaint out of southern living and shines a spotlight on the ignorance and prejudice with a razor-sharp and truly wicked sense of humor. Reading her stories left me amazed by her literary ability yet also a bit nauseated. What depresses me the most is that current events seem to bear out O'Connor's less than flattering assessment of human nature. Nothing else can explain Donald Trump's success in the polls.

“The sun was a huge red ball like an elevated Host drenched in blood and when it sank out of sight, it left a line in the sky like a red clay road hanging over the trees.”

The ninth story, “Good Country People”, would have made the perfect title for this collection written in the late 40s and early 50s and all set deep in the bible-belt South.
This was my first foray into the unsettling, racist, often brilliant, world of Flannery O’ Connor. These are dark, disturbing tales, told with insight and a wicked edge. Yes, the casual use of the “N” word or other very derogatory terms, made me uncomfortable, especially in the story “The Artificial Nigger” but her prose is so deft and sure that even that can be show more overlooked.
“…but the face on the moon was a grave one. It gazed across the room and out the window where it floated above the horse stall and appeared to contemplate itself with the look of a young man who sees his old age before him”. show less