Jesse > Recent Status Updates

Oh wait Jean DuPont is doing English impressions? WOULDNT BE HARD TO DO AN AMERICAN I BET

“It seemed almost miraculous that two people should have so many points of agreement.”

I thought that the dude might be a total Hans who somehow found out that she was the daughter of Giselle. This is fuel for the fire. But, as always, there are an army of red herrings that are their own mysteries waiting to be revealed…

Well, Poirot almost got sent to prison because the English jury was disposed against foreigners and a blowgun was found jammed in his seat. It’s been a bit of a change to see him as viewed as a suspect!

lol I am betting that Jane is the deceased Giselle’s daughter, raised under an assumed identity

Murder! In an airplane! In 1935!

“Judgement Day”

O’Connor’s final story is a rework of her first, “The Geranium”, about an old man who is living with his daughter in the city and finds an enormous emotional disconnect there. It’s one of her many race exploration stories and it’s as multifaceted as you would expect from someone who was intellectually opposed to racism but struggled to find the grace to turn her own feelings.

“Parker’s Back”

O’Connor writes about tattoos on a drifter who courts a very devout and taciturn lady who he can never seem to fully please. The transformation of Parker is sorrowful. This feels less like one of the author’s more typical stories of compassion and more metaphorical in Parker’s relationships with his wife, his self, and God. The implication is that God is what he has been looking for.

“Revelation”

This is sort of cathartic as an O’Connor story where one of her horribly sanctimonious feel-gooders is laid low by someone who may as well be standing in for the reader, or the author, who can’t take her speech anymore. Mrs. Turpin’s faith, allowing her to (sort of) have a dialogue with God and come to her revelation, feels like a significant difference from many of her characters.

“Why Do the Heathen Rage?”

A fragment of O’Connor’s unfinished, third novel. This sets the stage for whatever family drama was to happen - a father, having suffered a stroke, returning home to his two adult children who still live there - a scholar son and a schoolteacher daughter - and the desperate mother. I’m not sure what would have happened but the character archetypes are all O’Connor’s.

“The Lame Shall Enter First”

The ending of this story is probably the most significant of O’Connor’s stories that I’ve read because the transformation that she hints and suggests at for so many of her characters is explicitly related, no doubt due to the overweening intellectuality of Sheppard’s internal monologue.

“The Partridge Festival”

Especially within O’Connor’s microcosm, I love this story. It has a young intellectual full of contempt for a town where he used to visit family and a spree shooter who he is idolizing. Actually, it has TWO intellectuals, a man AND a woman, and they are just as snobby toward each other. It is this antagonism that spurs them onward toward Meeting Their Hero, with predictable results.

“Everything That Rises Must Converge”

Obviously there is an entire subgenre of stories of adults living uncomfortably with their parents, utilizing perhaps on some of O’Connor’s own feelings and fears. The drama is between a mother who pines for the pre-Civil War days and her son, who only leverages sympathy for African-Americans to scandalize his mother. Their emotional duel ends, of course, in tragedy.

“The Comforts of Home”

Thomas doesn’t like the interest that his mother has taken in a dispossessed, 19 yr old woman. This story may be the most sexually-charged of O’Connor’s that I’ve read thus far - excepting the stuff that got workshopped into Wise Blood - and Thomas’s attitude is brutally misogynistic but cloaked in intellectually moral superiority.

“The Enduring Chill”

A failed artist returns home, believing that his death is imminent. He blames his mother for his lack of creativity and he despises his sister and everyone he knows in New York is too bohemian to be affected by his personal tragedy. Asbury’s ego is self-destructive as he refuses to meet people he considers to be intellectually inferior on their level, demanding they meet him on his.

“A View of the Woods”

Bizarre power dynamics at play with an old man who torments his son in law, only for him to beat the old man’s favored grandchild, Mary Fortune. I had no idea where this was going to end up but I should have seen it coming. The old man’s hubris disallows him from seeing the horror he is inviting on his favorite. Worse, he doesn’t feel culpable and is mad at her for not fighting back.

“Greenleaf”

Somewhere in this is a similar framework as “Circle” in unruly white men disempowering female farm owners. The two worlds disdain of coexisting. For the Greenleafs, May’s adult sons should be doing random farm work, not them. It’s clear though that she is disengaged from the actual farm work but perceives herself as doing all of the work. All parties refuse to see how they are connected.

“You Can’t Be Any Poorer Than Dead”

The genesis of O’Connor’s second novel, The Violent Bear It Away. It’s a young boy who was raised by his very elderly uncle in seclusion and his uncle dies one morning at the breakfast table. It feels incomplete, clearly building to something not fully explored in this treatment, but the account of the boy wrestling with his responsibility to his uncle is compelling.

That finishes up O’Connor’s first published short story collection. They were all good, and while the tone is doomy and depressing, there is enough dark humor (and regular humor!) to keep them from becoming overbearing to me.

“Good Country People”

A devastating story in which a woman with a doctorate in philosophy is seduced by a Bible salesman who, after conniving to get her into a hay loft, steals her artificial leg. There’s a lot of overlap with O’Connor’s personal life, being a woman more or less confined to her mother’s house due to a health condition (Lupus) where Hulga has some sort of unspecified heart disease.