Review: Flannery by Brad Gooch
In Sunday's Baltimore Sun, read David L. Ulin's review of Flannery: A Life of Flannery O’Connor by Brad Gooch (Little, Brown / 416 pages / $30). Here are excerpts from the review:
Gooch opens Flannery ... with a lost moment: an account of how when O’Connor was 5, the Pathe newsreel company sent a cameraman to her home in Savannah, Ga., to film a chicken she had trained to walk backward. ...
"O’Connor’s screen debut," Gooch writes, "exists in all its fragility in a Pathe film archive. For all of four seconds, O’Connor, a self-possessed little girl, is glimpsed in glaring afternoon light, a wisp of curls peeking from beneath her cap, calmly coping with three chickens fluttering in her face." Here we have a stunning metaphor for not only her writing but also her existence: brief, glancing, almost impossible to pin down.
Flannery is just the second full biography of O’Connor. (The other is Jean W. Cash’s Flannery O’Connor: A Life.) It’s not that plenty hasn’t been written about her; O’Connor has, Gooch tells us, "become a one-woman academic industry," subject of countless dissertations and critical studies ... .
Yet 45 years after her death at 39 from lupus, O’Connor resists biographical treatment,
"As for biographies," she once noted, in a line Gooch uses as an epigraph, "there won’t be any biographies of me because, for only one reason, lives spent between the house and the chicken yard do not make exciting copy."
