O'Connor, Flannery. Wise Blood. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1952.

I like Flannery O'Connor, but I don't love her. This is a problem, I know, because if one reads half as obsessively as I do the words of other writers about how goes about writing fiction, one comes across Flannery's name and maxims at just about every turn. She is, without question, a genius, goes the belief. And maybe she is. She knows her way around a simile: "The little boys' faces were like pans set on either side to catch the grins that overflowed from her." She's also great at understated humor, most of it unquotable because it's so grounded in context, but here's one: "He was smiling. He looked like a friendly hound dog with light mange."

But whenever I read O'Connor all I can see behind her humor is meanness. O'Connor is not a writer who loves her characters. Granted, I've read maybe three stories and one of her two novels, but in each of them we're not meant to like anybody the way other writers invite us to. We don't like Hulga. We don't like Manley Pointer. We don't really like the Misfit and we sure as hell don't like the old woman he shoots dead. Or, rather, we can't like them, because each time we start to sympathize, O'Connor's got an impeccably worded and timed detail that makes us stand back and laugh at this person's foolishness.

She doesn't seem to do this in any po-mo argument way; that is, to comment on the futility of liking verbal constructs on the page as if they were actual people. No, she does it seemingly because there's too much morality at stake for us to actually get comfortable with anyone. And so, here, we laugh at Hazel Motes, who finds himself without family or friends in a small southern city, trying to shake off his preacher heritage. We laugh at Enoch Emery. We laugh at the "blind" preacher Hawks and we laugh at his daughter.

All in the name of what, exactly? I'm still trying to figure this out. I think what makes O'Connor such a celebrated writer is the force of her clear sentences and the careful control she has over the scope of her stories. There is never any excess. Also her takes on religion and faith are complex and uncommon in modern literature, which is great if complex, uncommon takes on faith and religion are what you're looking for in a book. Right now, I'm not looking for this. Books in which religion gets as much mention as feudal Belgium are what I think I want.