So I just finished Ann Napolitano's A Good Hard Look, which I picked up on sale at Borders when it was going out of business. I picked it up on a whim due to the subject matter: my favorite author of all time. Flannery O'Connor, queen of the southern gothic grotesqueries, was featured as a character in the book and despite my misgivings, I impulse-purchased it.
Flannery O'Connor is the closest thing I have to a literary crush. Between her sharp prose, her tragic life story and her devout Catholicism, I have nothing but respect for her and her writing. So of course I was unsure if I wanted to read a fictionalized version of her. I couldn't imagine that anything good would happen to her, and if it did, I wouldn't like it.
So it took this challenge to push me to finally pull it down from my collection of books (currently stored in a multitude of boxes in my parents' attic) and open it. I finished it in three days, and I have to say that it wasn't terrible.
It wasn't great either.
If you include a character as striking as Flannery O'Connor, I expect the prose to be snappy, terse, filled with unique details and a definite sense of setting. I had none of this. The prose felt similar to the sanitized writing I was taught in creative writing classes as an undergrad, lacking character or authorial voice of any kind. The craftsmanship was certainly there, like a set of unadorned walls, floors and ceilings, but the world feels hollow. The characters just bounce off each other, events happen without much character agency, and I felt Flannery O'Connor's steely gaze and wry smile as I read it, knowing that in her hands these characters would have been much uglier and the world they inhabit less spare and sanitary. The plot was pretty much by the numbers and I felt that the characters were too predictable. The best O'Connor short stories throw a monkey wrench at your expectations and shock you; this novel did not shock me at all.
I also felt that much of the writing surrounding critical events was obscured. This happens often when a writer is unsure of their ability to portray important events the way they appear in their head. I'm not sure if that's what happened, but I was disappointed that some of the very important action happened off screen, or in between words. I was also disappointed in the ending. I expect tragedy when Flannery O'Connor is involved, but the ending was too upbeat and positive for the events depicted. It should have ended forty pages sooner.
Ultimately, even though the subject matter was good, the flaws detracted from the experience. I feel that the overall whole is tainted by O'Connor's legacy. Having her in the story is the high point, to be sure, but it forces me to draw comparisons which leave this novel in a very poor light.
