Woodward: Flannery O'Connor Was Odd

But she wasn't nearly as odd as this article in last week's New York Times Sunday Book Review. From a new biography by Brad Gooch -- which I am looking forward to reading -- Joy Williams has extracted what appear to be the top 50 or so weird facts about Flannery O'Connor, pasted them together, and called them a book review. Either as a profile of O'Connor, or as a summary of the biography, or as an exercise in literary criticism, the essay is among the most condescending and torpid chunks of prose I have come across in quite a while. Among the things Williams seems to find most worth noting about O'Connor are that she sewed clothes for chickens, that she could not tell Robert and Sally Fitzgerald's children apart, that the civil rights movement "interested her not at all," and that "she is reported to have had beautiful blue eyes."

There you have it -- one of the seven or eight greatest American literary figures of the twentieth century in a nutshell.

Am I being paranoid in suspecting that what Joy Williams -- and, by extension, the New York Times -- really find oddest about Flannery O'Connor is that she was an intelligent, well-read, devout Christian?