Flannery

November 24, 2008
Gooch (City Poet:
The Life and Times of Frank O'Hara
) offers a surprisingly bloodless biography of Flannery O'Connor (1925–1964), who, despite the author's diligent scholarship, remains enigmatic. She emerges only in her excerpted letters, speeches and fiction, where she is as sharp-tongued, censorious, piteously observant and mordantly funny as her beloved short stories. There is little genuinely interesting new material, but there are small gems—the full story of O'Connor's friendship with the mysterious A. of her letters, for instance. Perhaps mindful of the writer's dislike of being exposed in print, Gooch errs on the side of delicacy; he does not sufficiently explore her attitudes toward blacks and how the early onset of lupus left her sequestered on her mother's Georgia farm, without the “male companionship” she craved. Instead, he plumbs O'Connor's fiction for buried fragments of her daily life, and the revelations are hardly astonishing. Readers looking for more startling tidbits will be disappointed by this account that brims with the quiet satisfactions the author took in her industry (“I sit all day typing and grinning like the Cheshire cat”), her faith, friends and stoic approach to a debilitating disease. 16 pages of b&w photos.

Starred review from December 15, 2008
For his new biography, Gooch ("City Poet: The Life and Times of Frank O'Hara") interviewed not only O'Connor's friends and literary allies Elizabeth Hardwick, Sally Fitzgerald (Robert Fitzgerald's wife), and Robert Giroux but also lifelong friends Betty Boyd; Erik Langkjaer, O'Connor's lone love interest; her uncle Dr. Bernard Cline, who influenced her obsession with birds; and Iowa Writers' Workshop director Paul Engle, who persuaded O'Connor to take up writing fiction and introduced her to John Crowe Ransom, Andrew Lytle, and Robert Penn Warren. Gooch's biography is a marvel of concision but skimps on nothing. Not a detailed analysis of O'Connor's fiction, it offers the brief, thematic shape of each novel and some short stories. Gooch writes of O'Connor's horrific lupus affliction, her grotesque and vaguely cartoonlike sense of humor, her complex religious sensibility, and her ability to learn something from every writer she read, from theologian Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (the source of her title "Everything That Rises Must Converge") to Carson McCullers, whose "Clock Without Hands" she judged "the worst book I have ever read." If O'Connor's writing glows with edged comic genius, biographer Gooch is himself no slouch. If a library is to have only one book on Flannery O'Connor, this should be it. Highly recommended. [See Prepub Alert, "LJ" 10/15/08.]Charles C. Nash, formerly with Cottey Coll., Nevada, MO

Copyright 2008 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from December 1, 2008
Esteemed biographer Gooch (author of City Poet: The Life and Times of Frank OHara, 1993) pulls, with great fondness and understanding, the life and personality of Flannery OConnor, the much celebrated Georgia novelist and short story writer, out from under the false impression, which has lasted for decades, thatOConnorwas an eccentric recluse. Her lifetime was relatively brief; she was diagnosed with lupus in her twenties and died of that disease in 1964 at age 39. But she was fierce in her determination to write, appreciatingher own worth as a fiction writer. Although confined for many years before her deathat the family farm outside Milledgeville with her widowed mother, she was an active and highly regarded member of the American literary scene of her day, keeping in close touch with important editors and luminaries inprose and poetry who were crucial to her literary career. Her many short stories and two novels were, despite their frequent depictions of violence, grounded in OConnors deep Catholic consciousness.Gooch comfortablytraces her fiction to its real-life rootsin a meticulous yet seemingly effortless writing style, resulting in the definitive biography as well as providing the impetus forgeneral readers to return to OConnors timeless fiction.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2008, American Library Association.)