A Good Hard Look - Ann Napolitano

     When I find a book that I love I am eager to post about it and, at the same time, hesitant to do so, knowing that I can never do it justice.  A Good Hard Look by Ann Napolitano is such a book.  How brave and daring she was to write a novel with Flannery O'Connor as a main character.  As a Flannery fan myself, I feared the novel would disappoint me.  That it wouldn't do Flannery O'Connor justice.  Instead, it surprised me with its genuine portrayal of the writer who's voice rings clear throughout the book.
     The novel is set in O'Connor's hometown of Milledgeville, Georgia on Andalusia, O'Connor's family farm.  It spans the last years of her life when she returned home after being diagnosed with systemic lupus from which she died at the age of 39.  The novel is told from the point of view of several characters whose lives change in a second and whose fate hinges on small moments with haunting consequences.  As do O'Connor's works, the novel explores the themes of death, faith, grace, forgiveness, and redemption.  Like O'Connor's, the characters are deeply flawed and painfully real.  In the aftermath of the events of one afternoon, these characters are forced to take a good hard look at the choices they have made.
     The book begins with the cacophony of screaming peacocks (the birds O'Connor famously collected and who play a large role in the novel) on the eve of a wedding that send the bride, the most beautiful girl in the small Southern town, tumbling from her bed to bruise her eye on a stool.  The next morning the bride wears a beautiful dress but all anyone can see is her eye.  As heads turn from her to the groom, speculating on the explanation for the eye, the bride is thinking about "how everything had turned on its head," as everything ultimately does in the novel.
     When Flannery offers up a wedding gift of the largest of her peacocks, the General, to Cookie and Melvin Whiteside, the wheels are set in motion for the tragedies ahead.  As the book proceeds, Flannery and Melvin develop an unlikely friendship in spite of Cookie forbidding it, Cookie employs Lorna, the wife of a local policeman, to design curtains for the Whiteson's home, and Lorna begins a relationship with her teenage assistant, Joe.  These lives weave together and move to a tragic climax that will cause one character to reflect, "Everyone had, at best, only one big story in his or her life; a story that rendered everything else just a footnote."
     It is a beautifully written novel that is hard to put down - one of the best books I've read this year.

~ Frances