A Good Hard Look
Ratings2
Average rating4.8
15
Ratings2
Average rating4.8
Crippled by lupus at twenty-five, celebrated author Flannery O’Connor was forced to leave New York City and return home to Andalusia, her family farm in Milledgeville, Georgia. Years later, as Flannery is finishing a novel and tending to her menagerie of peacocks, her mother drags her to the wedding of a family friend.
Cookie Himmel embodies every facet of Southern womanhood that Flannery lacks: she is revered for her beauty and grace; she is at the helm of every ladies’ organization in town; and she has returned from her time in Manhattan with a rich fiancée, Melvin Whiteson. Melvin has come to Milledgeville to begin a new chapter in his life, but it is not until he meets Flannery that he starts to take a good, hard look at the choices he has made. Despite the limitations of her disease, Flannery seems to be more alive than other people, and Melvin is drawn to her like a moth to a candle flame.
Melvin is not the only person in Milledgeville who starts to feel that life is passing him by. Lona Waters, the dutiful wife of a local policeman, is hired by Cookie to help create a perfect home. As Lona spends her days sewing curtains, she is given an opportunity to remember what it feels like to truly live, and she seizes it with both hands.
Heartbreakingly beautiful and inescapably human, these ordinary and extraordinary people chart their own courses in life. In the aftermath of one tragic afternoon, they are all forced to look at themselves and face up to Flannery’s observation that the truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it.
Reviews with the most likes.
Ann Napolitano is brave. Fictionalizing a prominent person in history would make most writers nervous, but making that person such an important and central figure to the plot—well, I think many of us would prefer to leave that to the likes of Napolitano. In A Good Hard Look, Flannery O'Connor takes the stage with a backdrop of her hometown, Milledgeville, Georgia. O'Connor and Milledgeville are both crafted with great care and grace; it is evident the author not only researched her subjects, but handled them with great adoration and empathy.
A Good Hard Look is penned with great skill. Most outstanding is Napolitano's beautiful language, a myriad of well-placed and wonderfully chosen words. Also, worth noting are the perspectives. Her use of the alternating third-person is executed extremely well. In a novel such a this, timing is crucial, and I feel the author did a fabulous job knowing what character to follow and when to abandon ship.
For me, there is a shift in my feelings toward these characters midway through the novel. By no tricks of the author—just careful planning and raw talent—the characters who are reasonable become flawed; those who at first seem beyond redemption elicit my sympathies. This promotes the feelings of forgiveness at the novel's center without preaching and without excessive evidence of the author's hand.
Only months ago, I read O'Connor's collection A Good Man Is Hard to Find. I appreciated O'Connor's talent, but I didn't fall in love with the collection as I had hoped. I still wanted to read more O'Connor, but her works moved down my priority list considerably. Reading Napolitano's novel gets me in the mood to read O'Connor again. Anytime an author spends considerable time with an historical character, they should have strong feelings for the subject—either love or hate—otherwise the true person dissolves into a mere plot device. Those feelings should be evident to the reader. Napolitano makes Flannery very alive for me. And because of that, I am once again excited to read O'Connor. And even more excited to revisit Napolitano.
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