Book Review: A Good Man is Hard to Find

Upon completing my Flannery O'Connor reading/listening tour, I can state with confidence that O'Connor's writing got better as she aged. These stories are fantastic but in general pale in comparison with her second published collection, Everything That Rises Must Converge. The exception is the title story, which is as good as anything she's written. Also, a few of the stories deal with themes like race and immigration better than the later stories (although I'm always a little ambivalent when she writes about race -- this may be my biggest problem with her writing -- she critiques racism, but she doesn't seem to critique it enough and is too resigned to it). O'Connor writes characters like the grandmother in the title story that are absurd and oblivious to their own absurdity, and you can never escape the fact that you yourself are caught up in the same mess. The shortcoming of this collection may be that most of her targets are easier and more distant from the reader, and easier for this reader at least to rationalize as "them" rather than "me." Regardless, even if this was all we had, it would still be clear that O'Connor is a great writer. The good news is she gets even better.