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A review by kerrianne
Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose by Sally Fitzgerald, Flannery O'Connor, Robert Fitzgerald
2.0
I've never seen a collection of nonfiction essays start so beautifully and diminish in readability so steadily. By the end of this collection I'd lost respect for a writer I'd previously been quite fond of, because by the end of the collection she'd been flat-out and pretentiously preaching to me for a solid 150 pages. I really didn't like the way some of these essays were written, but more to the point, I didn't like the way this collection was organized and shared. I'm chocking that up to being entirely the wrong collection of essays for me, and placing equal blame on myself for choosing it solely based on its cover when we visited the charming bookstore in Faulkner's once-home in New Orleans this past November, and on the fact that it was curated posthumously by two of O'Connor's closest friends.
I've always enjoyed Flannery O'Connor's writing style. Her stories have such punch and depth and she always struck me as someone with heaps of wit and charm that inevitably dripped into the short stories of hers I read in high school and during my undergraduate lit studies. True to that known form, the first essay is about raising peacocks on her family's farm in rural Georgia, and it's so vibrant and funny and has so many elements that remind me of my favorite naturalist writers.
Likewise, some of her essays on fiction (and fiction readers) are honest and funny, equal parts brusque and charming. Some of her lines really spoke to me. Like this, one, for example, from The Fiction Writer & His Country: "The writer can choose what he writes about but he cannot choose what he is able to make live."
But some of the later essays in this collection are so heavy-handed with their Catholic overtures, so distractingly and unnecessarily religiously zealous in their judgment of other readers and writers that even to me as a fellow born and bred and baptized (if not altogether and intentionally lapsed) Catholic they were nearly unreadable. Likewise, many of them feel equal parts unfinished and wholly repetitive, which again, isn't so much O'Connor's fault so much as it is those responsible for this collection's curation and publication.
[Two-point-five stars for her peacocks and pertinent fiction pieces.]
I've always enjoyed Flannery O'Connor's writing style. Her stories have such punch and depth and she always struck me as someone with heaps of wit and charm that inevitably dripped into the short stories of hers I read in high school and during my undergraduate lit studies. True to that known form, the first essay is about raising peacocks on her family's farm in rural Georgia, and it's so vibrant and funny and has so many elements that remind me of my favorite naturalist writers.
Likewise, some of her essays on fiction (and fiction readers) are honest and funny, equal parts brusque and charming. Some of her lines really spoke to me. Like this, one, for example, from The Fiction Writer & His Country: "The writer can choose what he writes about but he cannot choose what he is able to make live."
But some of the later essays in this collection are so heavy-handed with their Catholic overtures, so distractingly and unnecessarily religiously zealous in their judgment of other readers and writers that even to me as a fellow born and bred and baptized (if not altogether and intentionally lapsed) Catholic they were nearly unreadable. Likewise, many of them feel equal parts unfinished and wholly repetitive, which again, isn't so much O'Connor's fault so much as it is those responsible for this collection's curation and publication.
[Two-point-five stars for her peacocks and pertinent fiction pieces.]