A Good Man Is Hard to Find

The test is subtractive, and in the strong stories it finds nothing. The title story’s first pages, the cat hidden in the basket and the grandmother’s lie about a secret panel, are the mechanism of the crash: every comic detail is a fuse. “Good Country People” spends its first third on Mrs. Hopewell’s platitudes and Mrs. Freeman’s appetites, and the whole of it is needed, because the seduction in the hayloft reverses exactly the pieties set up there. “The Displaced Person” is long, and its length is compelled: three women’s views of one man must be built before the tractor can roll. What holds the axis are the two slight stories. “A Stroke of Good Fortune” is a single joke on the denial of a pregnancy, and “A Late Encounter with the Enemy” a single irony on a Confederate relic; either could go, and the book would know what it knows.

Score: 8.6 / 10

The disclosure can be stated, and it holds: the respectable self, with its manners, its charity, its intellect and its property, is a defence against reality, and the defence is broken only by violence or humiliation, which may be the occasion of grace. The grandmother is a liar and a snob until the gun is at her; then she reaches toward the Misfit, “Why you’re one of my babies”, and is shot for it. Hulga, the doctor of philosophy who believes in nothing, is outdone in nihilism by a Bible salesman. Mrs. McIntyre’s farm shows how a community kills a stranger by agreement without anyone deciding to. Held below the top for two reasons. It is one disclosure in ten settings; and the book sees its Black characters, Astor and Sulk and the figures of the boy’s frightened view in the city, from outside, so that the racial condition is shown as the whites’ blindness rather than opened from within.

Score: 8.8 / 10

The register is comic and grotesque, and the elevation comes against it, which is why it strikes. The grandmother’s gesture in the woods, after the shots, is the book’s height, transport and terror at once. “The Artificial Nigger” closes on Mr. Head and Nelson before the plaster figure on a lawn, a moment O’Connor makes into mercy descending on two humiliated people, and the old man feels himself ready for Paradise. The boy walking alone into the river in “The River” to find the Kingdom of Christ is a dreadful height. “A Temple of the Holy Ghost” ends on the sun likened to the elevated Host, and “The Displaced Person” rises at its close to the peacock’s tail and the priest’s words over a dying farm. Perhaps six of the ten reach a real summit. Held below the higher reaches because three stories rise little, and because the heights are of one kind, the violent irruption, rather than many.

Score: 8.7 / 10

Built, not evoked. The Christian pattern bears the load in nearly every story. In “The River” the child takes the preacher’s name and takes the preacher’s words literally, and enters the water to be counted: baptism and drowning are one act. In “A Temple of the Holy Ghost” the hermaphrodite at the fair says what God made him, and the monstrance at the convent follows. “The Artificial Nigger” makes the descent into the city an underworld, with Mr. Head a guide who fails and a Peter who denies. The peacock in “The Displaced Person” is Christ’s eye, and the Misfit is a dark prophet whose theology is exact and who has refused the faith he understands. The particulars stay particular: a Georgia family in a Hudson, a tramp’s car, a wooden leg. Held below the top because the archetype is the same Pauline one throughout, and is sometimes signposted, in tree lines, suns and names, so that the reader is told where to look.

Score: 8.8 / 10

The inheritance is plain: the Southern grotesque of Faulkner and Erskine Caldwell, the tall tale and Southwestern humour, the well-made magazine story of the 1940s, and Joyce’s story of epiphany. The turn is the joining of these to a strict Catholic theology, told in the Protestant South through characters who would despise it, so that the comic grotesque becomes the vehicle of grace rather than of social satire or of decadence. Violence is not the region’s curse, as in Faulkner, but God’s instrument. The stake was real: a Catholic writer making slapstick and murder carry the sacramental, at a moment when the serious short story was psychological and secular, and before readers who took her, and still take her, for a cruel satirist; she answered that reception herself in her lectures. Held here because much of the form is inherited intact: the closed story of a single turn is the magazine story perfected, not broken.

Score: 8.6 / 10

Change the form and the book loses what it knows. Each story is built as a slow comic exposure of a self-satisfied mind followed by a single sudden blow, and the knowledge is in the ratio: grace is not earned by development but arrives as an interruption, so the story must be long in complacency and short in catastrophe. A novel would have to supply the aftermath and the change, which this grace refuses to guarantee. The free indirect style that rides inside the grandmother or Mrs. Hopewell, mocking their clichés in their own words, is the second instrument: the reader shares the complacency the ending breaks. The book’s order adds a third, ten repetitions of the pattern in ten guises, so that the pattern reads as law. Held below the top because the collection is an arrangement rather than a composed sequence: the stories share no character or place, and the order, though meaningful, could change in its middle without loss.

Score: 8.8 / 10

The evidence is seventy years of return, in a large and continuing criticism and in the classroom, where the title story is among the most taught of American stories. The questions stay open. Is the grandmother’s gesture grace, or the last move of a manipulator? Is the Misfit damned, or nearer God than anyone in the car? Is the boy’s drowning in “The River” salvation or the book’s cruellest joke, and does the book know the difference? Is “The Artificial Nigger” a parable of mercy, or a story that uses a racist object to resolve white guilt? O’Connor’s own account of her intentions, in the essays collected after her death, has not closed these readings and has opened new quarrels. The sentences repay return: on a second reading the jokes become prophecy. Held below the top because the theological frame, once seen, organises the yield; returns deepen the frame more than they overturn it.

Score: 8.8 / 10

The field is American short fiction of the mid twentieth century. The intrinsic force is high. The book showed that the grotesque comic story could carry metaphysical and religious weight without irony at its expense, and that a writer could make violence sacramental in a secular literary culture; that changed what the Southern story, and the American story, could be about. Where Hemingway’s In Our Time (8.6 on this desk) had remade the prose of the American story, this book remade its matter. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the reach is wide and lasting, the title story and “Good Country People” fixtures of anthologies and of teaching, and O’Connor’s example running on through later Southern writing. What holds the axis is that the reach is strongest in American letters and in English; outside them her standing is real, but narrower.

Score: 8.6 / 10

Survival is demonstrated over seventy-one years, and weighed on form, presence and fabric. Form: the text survives whole as published, undamaged, and nothing is charged to it. Presence: continuous since 1955, in print without a break, taught in schools and universities across the English-speaking world, and gathered into The Complete Stories, which won the National Book Award in 1972, and into the Library of America in 1988. Fabric: the surface is fixed to its moment, the rural South after the war, the displaced persons of Europe, the Confederate reunion, but the stories do not depend on it. Its racial vocabulary troubles readers now and has prompted reconsiderations of the author; it has not removed the book from teaching. The book stands at the usual figure for its span of seventy years to two centuries; the widest presence is not quite reached.

Score: 9.0 / 10

Judged on O’Connor’s English, with no translation between. The command is of three things. Dialogue: the speech of Georgia country people caught without condescension of ear, every cliché exact, and the Misfit’s courteous, terrible talk. Comic timing: the cat in the basket, the wooden leg in the hayloft, Mr. Shiftlet’s sermon on the human heart before he steals the car and abandons his wife at a diner. And the last line, placed with a poet’s control: the Misfit’s “It’s no real pleasure in life” closes the title story. The free indirect narration mocks and inhabits at once. Held below the top on two charges: a repertoire of symbolic machinery, the tree line, the sun, the sky, that recurs from story to story and can feel applied; and the two slighter stories, which are cleanly made but under less pressure.

Score: 8.9 / 10

One law governs the whole: the proud self is broken by an outside force, violent or humiliating, and the breaking is the only opening for grace, which may or may not be taken. Take the most distant elements: the farce of “A Stroke of Good Fortune”, a woman climbing the stairs in denial of her pregnancy, and the near liturgy at the close of “The Displaced Person”, a dying farm and an old priest. They obey the same law: a self refusing what is coming, and what comes. The comic and the terrible are one register throughout, never alternating; the voice that laughs at the grandmother’s hat lays her dead in a ditch with her legs crossed under her like a child’s. The range is wider than one milieu suggests: children, intellectuals, widowed landowners, tramps, a Polish refugee. Held here because the law is a single one, and is sometimes enforced on the material rather than found in it.

Score: 8.8 / 10

Judged on what the book holds, as a book of stories, and not marked down for being short beyond what it holds. Consciousness: the self-deceiving mind, rendered from inside. The family: a grandmother, her son and his children, mothers and daughters, and fathers absent. Labour and land: the farm as an economy in “The Displaced Person” and “A Circle in the Fire”, its hired hands and tenants, the white widow who owns it and those who depend on her. Race and class, as the order of the South, seen from the white side. History: the war in Europe and its refugees, and the Confederacy as a museum piece. The sacred, everywhere and load-bearing; the natural order, in woods, rivers, fire and sun. One law integrates them. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is what is missing: the state is absent, the city appears once, and the world beyond the rural South enters only as Mr. Guizac.

Score: 7.7 / 10