Misunderstood

All that darkness was in the service of eternal brightness. All that violence was in the service of peace and serenity.

Jonathan Rogers, The Terrible Speed of Mercy

Few 20th century writers, or at least those writers taken seriously by literary scholars and taught in college classrooms, have been as committed to conveying the Christian understanding of grace and redemption as Flannery O'Connor. Yet her stories are so dark, so violent, so grotesque that few readers readily grasp what they are really about.

O'Connor, a devout Catholic who tried to attend Mass every day, made no secret about what her goals were in her fiction, yet most of those who read her novels and short stories see something else in them. She hated reading reviews of her books because reviewers so rarely understood them.

Brad Gooch wrote an excellent biography in 2009, Flannery: A Life of Flannery O'Connor, so perhaps another biography wasn't necessary so soon after, yet the much shorter The Terrible Speed of Mercy: A Spiritual Biography of Flannery O'Connor by Jonathan Rogers (2012) serves a different end. Rogers, while giving a good summary of her life and making good use of Gooch's book in the process, has another goal in mind. He seeks to discover what made O'Connor tick, what she believed and how those beliefs shaped her fiction.

"My audience are the people who think God is dead. At least these are the people I am conscious of writing for," O'Conner once wrote in a letter. These, in fact, may have been the people who liked her stories best. Christians, especially those who were her neighbors in Milledgeville, Ga., either didn't read her books or didn't like them if they did. They were proud of her literary accomplishments but just wished she would write a different kind of fiction, something a bit nicer.

Rogers writes, "For O'Connor, the real horror was never violence or deformity, but damnation." Even her morally worst characters usually find sudden grace by the end of her stories, that "terrible speed of mercy" brought home.

O'Connor suffered from lupus for much of her short life. She was just 39 when she died. She left behind two novels and numerous short stories that will be read, and perhaps occasionally understood, for years to come.