A Good Hard Look

          The peacocks tilted their heads back and bellowed and hollered their desires into the night. They snapped their shimmering tails open and shut like fans. Behind each male’s pointy head, a green-bronze arch unfurled, covered with a halo of gazing suns. The females brayed and shook their less-attractive tails in return.

The birds didn’t care that it was the middle of the night, and they didn’t care who they were disturbing. They didn’t care that there was a wedding tomorrow, or that the groom, who had just arrived from New York City, was lying beneath a lace canopy at his in-law’s house, paralyzed with fear. They didn’t care that his fiancée startled awake in the next room and toppled out of her high bed, and they certainly didn’t care that her face hit a stool on the way down. They didn’t care that the rest of the small Georgia town was also awake, twitching in their beds like beached fish.

The peacocks were not out to make friends. They were out to do what they liked, when they liked. They choose this particular time on this particular night for the same reason they choose to eat the flowers in the side garden the moment they bloomed. They preferred roses and hyacinths, bet deigned to eat tulips as well. They claimed every inch of the farm, which meant the wide expanse of lawn in front of the farmhouse shimmered under a layer of white refuse. (pg. 3)

Many years ago I read some Flannery O’Connor short stories and was hooked. I couldn’t believe how this author could strip her characters to their bare essence exposing their flaws with such well chosen words. Her words made you uncomfortable and yet were so beautifully written; I had to go back for more. I ended up reading quite a bit of O’Connor’s work including A Good Man is Hard to Find and Other Stories and a compilation of her letters (The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O’Connor by Flannery O’Connor and Sally Fitzgerald) and it was interesting to see how Flannery’s life and faith played such a big role in her writing.

So when I heard Ann Napolitano had written a novel set in Flannery’s home town with the writer as a character, I was interested in reading it.  The novel, A Good Hard Look, echos the title of one of Flannery’s more famous stories. I have heard different reviews of this book with some thinking there is  not enough of Flannery or there was too much of Flannery – so I wanted to see for myself.

The story opens on the night before Cookie marries Melvin in Milledgeville, Georgia when everyone in town is awaken by the screeching of Flannery’s restless peacocks. Cookie grew up in this small town and her family is friends with the O’Connor Family although Flannery makes Cookie very nervous and extremely uncomfortable. Melvin, independently wealthy and a former banker from New York City, settles into small town life but he feels restless and unfulfilled. In search of something, Melvin develops a friendship with the somewhat reclusive author.

Restlessness is one of the reoccurring themes of the novel, almost everyone is restless for one reason or another and this restlessness manifests itself in different ways. The peacocks screech, Cookie keeps changing her mind about curtains, Lona smokes pot before going to work on those same curtains, and seventeen year old Joe hides because it is “safer and easier to withdraw into a ball and focus on surviving these sixty seconds” rather than think about the future. As this restlessness converges and explodes the characters are left to wonder who they are and what choices they should make to do forward.

In the conversations between Flannery and Melvin, Flannery does what she does in her writing – she gets to the heart of matters, getting you to question who you are, getting you to come up with your own definitions of who you are and not simply accepting someone else’s definition. Flannery talks of the violence in her writing as well as change when Melvin questions her about her characters’ ending places:

 “Maybe I left them on their way to a happy ending…I’m sure you didn’t consider this,” she said, “but it’s possible that the characters are closer to grace at the end of the stories. Grace changes a person, you know. And change is painful. It’s just like you agnostic types to see the pain, but not the transformation.” (pg. 85)

Melvin feels “his life was a messy compilation of moments that didn’t fit together. If Flannery wove them into a narrative, they would have cohesion and significance. He would be able to read about himself and all that was inexplicable in real life would be explained.” (pg.110) This is a novel about people seeking meaning, a structure to help them explain who they are. Some, like Cookie, hide within their structure running from the messiness of life and others struggle and wrestle. All of them must eventually take a good hard look at themselves.

What I ultimately found with this novel is that while Flannery is definitely a part of the narrative, it is more about her themes then the author herself, her ideas about getting to the crux of who you are as a person and to ultimately transform yourself into something better. This is a novel that has a good chance of being on my best of list for this year. I highly recommend it.

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