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Review of
Flannery O'Connor:
the Woman, the Thinker, the Visionary
Having always enjoyed reading the short stories of Flannery O'Connor, I picked up a biography of her, since I was very curious about her personal life. I had questions about what possessed her to write such hauntingly grotesque, anti-religious stories, when she herself was a devout Catholic her entire life. The title of this book led me to believe it had a little bit of it all: some personal biographical information, her personal thoughts, and insights into why she wrote the way she did.
I was to be disappointed. Though Ted R. Spivey writes in a very concise, proper manner, the book had almost none of the background information I was looking for. I wanted to know about her childhood, her family life, her early hopes and dreams. But all of the information Spivey provides about her is as Flannery O'Connor, the writer. His personal information consisted of her personal letter correspondence with other authors as they discussed books they'd recently read and tried to decipher the hidden meaning in them. He included her opinion of authors and several times included details of their personal correspondence. The rest of the book then jumped into a critical analysis of her way of thinking and how she wrote her books, as well as evaluating her place in America's anthology of writers.
While the book is definitely not bad, Spivey's writing style failed to capture me. He did initially, with the first chapter, wherein he begins to discuss his and O'Connor's relationship. But perhaps because of my disappointment, the book lagged along. Spivey's own personal voice felt aloof, even distant, as he commented with no more emotion than a stockbroker listing the current stock exchange rates. It felt as though Spivey's heart wasn't really in the book. I expected to feel something more personal, even emotional, for Spivey claimed early on that he and O'Connor were close friends and correspondents.
Containing only a few bits of pertinent information about O'Connor herself and several redundant statements about her view on the south, God, and literature, Spivey could have written the book in half as many pages and said the same amount. At some points in the book Spivey caught my attention by including a little tidbit about O'Connor as he discussed a book of hers. My favorite parts were the clumps of conversation and quotes that he included. I grasped at and held on to these parts. The details about how she got angry with Spivey when he tried to impress her, and how she was judgmental of people who didn?t hold to her ideals of orthodoxy, were the inside story that I wanted to read about. But these pieces were few and far between. The majority of the book was an analysis of her short stories. The last few chapters contained several pages of summary of her novels, with short introductions concerning her visionary attitudes about people in general and southerners in particular.
In his own way, Spivey is insightful and obviously feels he knew O'Connor intimately enough to write a book about her. Perhaps he thought outlining her earlier history would have been too much like the other twenty biographies that have been written about Flannery O'Connor, and so he attempted to only lightly touch on that part of her life. Being as it is, however, the book is heavy on analysis but short on background information. Therefore this book should have been entitled Flannery O'Connor: My Critical Analysis, not Flannery O'Connor: the Woman, the Thinker, the Visionary.
