Flannery

Flannery O’Connor is one of the most visionary writers to ever walk the land, but there hasn’t been a major biography of her until now, with the arrival of Brad Gooch’s Flannery: A Life of Flannery O’Connor, which I'm anxiously awaiting in the mail.

When I first read O’Connor, in college, I was knocked-out by her tragi-comic stories. I'd never read anything quite like it before and have read few things like it since. And behind her fantastically strange art, there was quite a peculiar life, one I’d known little about except for the more famous details: devout Catholicism, young death from lupus, love of peacocks. So I was happy to hear about Gooch’s book and also to come across a review by the ever-awesome Joy Williams in the NYT, where I learned that O’Connor sewed outfits for her chickens as a child, referred to her novels as “Opus Nauseous,” once sent Robert Lowell a five-foot long peacock feather, and believed “a writer with Christian concerns needed to take ever more violent means to get her vision across to them.” Those details alone were enough to make me hop over to Amazon and add Flannery to my virtual shopping cart.

But back to the NYT review. I was intrigued by the way Williams eschewed writing a review in the traditional sense—rather she conjured a wonderfully idiosyncratic and moving portrait of O’Connor, though if you read between the lines, she seemed to be dissing the book a little. Given all the conversation we’ve been having around here about reviewing, I’m wondering what people thought of her approach. Needlessly coy? Smart and artful? None of the above?