Flannery O’Connor

I was profoundly impressed by the stories of Flannery O’Connor – I think she’s probably the American Chekhov. They’re just so beautifully constructed, so powerful, so dazzling that the unexpected shift in plot resists analysis, almost as it does in Raymond Carver’s brilliant story “Cathedral.” The difference is that, with “Cathedral,” you can analyze it, pinpointing the moment of that shift in the triangle between the three people in the story (a lovely way to set up a story because you know that by its end the balance will shift, it’s got to be two against one). The shift there is unexpected, all right; somehow the husband the blind man team up against the wife, whereas at the beginning it’s the wife and the blind man teamed up against the husband. But at least you can follow the shift; you know exactly what’s happening. Whereas with O’Connor, as in “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” or “Good Country People,” the story is so artless – or artful – that you don’t know what’s happening until suddenly at the end, there it is, it’s all happened. It’s precisely because you can’t analyze it that it’s so powerful and immediate a story.

by Anne Bernays in “For the Love of Books”