Flannery O'Connor Pilgrimage

The New York Times has a marvelous travel story about visiting the birth place of Flannery O'Connor. It's very much worth reading if like her. Hurray for the writer, Lawrence Downes! I love the way he encapsulates the O'Connor body of work. He writes:

O’Connor’s short stories and novels are set in a rural South where people know their places, mind their manners and do horrible things to one another. It’s a place that somehow hovers outside of time, where both the New Deal and the New Testament feel like recent history. It’s soaked in violence and humor, in sin and in God. He may have fled the modern world, but in O’Connor’s he sticks around, in the sun hanging over the tree line, in the trees and farm beasts, and in the characters who roost in the memory like gargoyles. It’s a land haunted by Christ — not your friendly hug-me Jesus, but a ragged figure who moves from tree to tree in the back of the mind, pursuing the unwilling.
Many people — me for instance — are in turn haunted by O’Connor. Her doctrinally strict, mordantly funny stories and novels are as close to perfect as writing gets. Her language is so spare and efficient, her images and character’s speech so vivid, they burn into the mind. Her strange Southern landscape was one I knew viscerally but, until this trip, had never set foot in. I had wondered how her fictional terrain and characters, so bizarre yet so blindingly real, might compare with the real places and people she lived among and wrote about.

I also got a real kick out of how my friend L. sent me an email about the story, noting that it included our friend J.'s favorite line from a Flannery O'Connor story. She didn't even have to include the line. I knew exactly which one she meant: “She would of been a good woman,” the Misfit said, “if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.”
Read the whole NYT story here.