He had jumped into the tree and his tail hung in front of her, full of fierce planets with eyes that were each ringed in green and set against a sun that was gold in one second’s light and salmon-colored in the next. She might have been looking at a map of the universe but she didn’t notice it any more than she did the spots of sky that cracked the dull green of the tree. She was having an inner vision instead. She was seeing the ten million billion of them pushing their way into new places over here and herself, a giant angel with wings as wide as a house, telling the Negroes that they would have to find another place.
A remarkable collection of short stories, each highly engaging, excrutiatingly relatable, and daring. O’Connor’s prose flows at a perfect pace with a focus on the right words rather than the prettiest ones; her symbols subtle and provocative, her contemplations on a universal experience dressed in the settings of her familiar world.
The arrangement guides the reader through various themes which all speak to an experience of transition. Children rebel against parents, the elderly pine for a bygone past, and people resist the tide of social change. Yet O’Connor does not qualify these themes with her opinions. No, in her stories, we read her own contemplations of their common denominator – transformation. How does change impact the remnants of the old order and form the pioneers of the new?
Each account exposes a moral foundation threatened by the back how of progress. The elderly don’t simply yearn for their day, they grapple with a loss of self; how they view their own quality and goodness no longer validated by the new order of the world. The young no longer look to previous generations to determine their own value and self-efficacy. During this specific shift in American social history, the old generation and new both find themselves lost and adrift; isolated and grasping an edge by their fingertips. These stories explore the emotional turmoil of such experiences without necessarily stamping them as right or wrong, “good guy” or “bad guy”. In this way, these stories remain timeless and eternally relatable.
O’Connor “writes hard”, as Hemingway might say, about what she knows. And it is hard. The modern reader might cringe at the characters and happenings in her stories. And, in many cases, will surely gasp at her endings, even when anticipated. Here inlies the beauty of O’Connor’s talent, bolstered by an artistic fearlessness to expose the nature of the people – wherever they land on our personal moral spectrums – rather than just the circumstances of the period.
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