A Good Man is Hard to Find

I am not going to say that this phrase hasn't come in handy from time to time, even before I got myself a copy of Flannery's O'Connor's collection. A Good Man is Hard to Find. Once you're read the title story, however, the phrase loses all of its sly intimations. O'Connor wouldn't waste her talents on something as basic as questionable character or an unsatisfying mate. It's a whole lot more harrowing than that.

Here's a bit on my foray into Flannery's fictive world.

There is something unmistakably Southern about Flannery O'Connor's writing. The cadences in the language of her often unnamed characters. God and faith religiously invoked along the dusty roads, within simple frame houses. These country climes belie- time and again- the dark and brutal; stories of seemingly small and innocent choices that slyly become sinister vignettes of the callousness of human nature. The men and women who populate these small towns and rural landscapes are hardened, but somehow hopeful, simultaneously cunning and exploited. They are at once wily and shrewd, righteous and fearful.

In the title story of the collection "A Good Man is Hard to Find," a grandmother's relentless anxiety over becoming a victim of a serial killer named The Misfit evolves, from a familiar depiction of a batty old woman's wild imaginings to a coldly realized, almost unbelievable, encounter with teh very object of her terror. In the Life You Save May Be Your Own," it's hard to know to whom we should direct greater disdain - the old woman who is so willingly marries off her mute and innocent daughter - or Mr. Shiftlet who is, as his name suggests, a cagey, unreliable character whose overtures of generosity barely mask his greater motives for profit and escape.

There is an inevitability in these stories, dark and disappointing endings lurking from the start. But knowing where O'Connor is taking us does not demean the pleasures in getting there.