Ed Simon at The Hedgehog Review:
Short though her life was, O’Connor produced a distinctive body of work—two short-story collections, A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Everything that Rises Must Converge, and her two novels Wise Blood and The Violent Bear It Away, along with luminous essays and a rich, often hilariously detailed, correspondence—that more than justifies her standing as a classic American author. Her fiction is replete with certain types—hillbillies and carnival barkers, tent revival preachers and geek show performers—but her concern was always with grace, of the ways in which the irredeemable can be redeemed, the unsalvageable can be saved (which is to say all of us to varying degrees). What fascinated O’Connor, intellectually and spiritually, were the complexities of the soul, not how good people can be capable of bad, but how even evil people are sometimes capable of good, the ways in which “this current comes openly to the surface and is seen as the sudden emergence of the underground rivers of the mind into the clear spring of grace,” as she wrote in a 1956 book review. A moral universe with original sin, yes, but not total depravity.
more here.
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