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"Many of my ardent admirers would be roundly shocked and disturbed if they realized that everything I believe is thoroughly moral, thoroughly Catholic, and that it is these beliefs that give my work its chief characteristics." --Flannery O'Connor Flannery O'Connor's work has been described as "profane, blasphemous, and outrageous." Her stories are peopled by a sordid caravan of murderers and thieves, prostitutes and bigots whose lives are punctuated by horror and sudden violence. But perhaps the most shocking thing about Flannery O'Connor's fiction is the fact that it is shaped by a thoroughly Christian vision. If the world she depicts is dark and terrifying, it is also the place where grace makes itself known. Her world--our world--is the stage whereon the divine comedy plays out; the freakishness and violence in O'Connor's stories, so often mistaken for a kind of misanthropy or even nihilism, turn out to be a call to mercy. In this biography, Jonathan Rogers gets at the heart of O'Connor's work. He follows the roots of her fervent Catholicism and traces the outlines of a life marked by illness and suffering, but ultimately defined by an irrepressible joy and even hilarity. In her stories, and in her life story, Flannery O'Connor extends a hand in the dark, warning and reassuring us of the terrible speed of mercy.… (more)
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I enjoyed this book despite its brevity and cursory information and am inspired now to go back and re-read her stories, and read her two novels.
O'Connor, a devout Catholic who tried to attend Mass every day, made no secret about what her goals were in her fiction, yet most of those who read her novels and short stories see something else in them. She hated reading reviews of her books because reviewers so rarely understood them.
Brad Gooch wrote an excellent biography in 2009, “Flannery: A Life of Flannery O'Connor,” so perhaps another biography wasn't necessary so soon after, yet the much shorter “The Terrible Speed of Mercy: A Spiritual Biography of Flannery O'Connor” by Jonathan Rogers (2012) serves a different end. Rogers, while giving a good summary of her life and making good use of Gooch's book in the process, has another goal in mind. He seeks to discover what made O'Connor tick, what she believed and how those beliefs shaped her fiction.
"My audience are the people who think God is dead. At least these are the people I am conscious of writing for," O'Conner once wrote in a letter. These, in fact, may have been the people who liked her stories best. Christians, especially those who were her neighbors in Milledgeville, Ga., either didn't read her books or didn't like them if they did. They were proud of her literary accomplishments but just wished she would write a different kind of fiction, something a bit nicer.
Rogers writes, "For O'Connor, the real horror was never violence or deformity, but damnation." Even her morally worst characters usually find sudden grace by the end of her stories, that "terrible speed of mercy" brought home.
O'Connor suffered from lupus for much of her short life. She was just 39 when she died. She left behind two novels and numerous short stories that will be read, and perhaps occasionally understood, for years to come.