A Good Hard Look is a novel about the last few years of writer Flannery O’Connor’s life. The book begins with the wedding of Cookie Himmel and Melvin Whiteson, which Cookie believes has been ruined because Flannery’s peacocks made so much noise the night before that Cookie fell out of bed and gave herself a black eye. Flannery’s mother Regina insists that Flannery attend the wedding, but Cookie is not happy to see her there.
Lona Waters lives her life absentmindedly and takes pleasure only in the hour of solitude she has every day before her daughter Gina comes home from school. Then her friend Miss Mary asks her if she will give her awkward teenage son Joe a job, thereby eliminating her hour.
Soon Melvin Whiteson has struck up a friendship with Flannery, but he keeps it a secret from his wife because of her dislike of the writer. Cookie is busily serving on committees in town and trying to get Flannery’s books banned from the library, while Melvin, a successful New York banker who gave up his career to move to this small town in Georgia with Cookie, is feeling out of place and bored with his insurance job.
These seemingly mundane stories eventually result in tragedies that force the main characters to take a good hard look at themselves, as Flannery states is a technique she uses in her fiction.
The novel is well written but not evocative. It does not evoke the 60’s South, and my feeling is that it does not evoke Flannery O’Connor. I am not an expert on her or her life, but the incisive spirit I would expect from her is missing in this character. Napolitano uses O’Connor’s peacocks to great effect, but I found that the novel tidied things up a bit more neatly than I would expect from one inspired by O’Connor’s life and works. Finally, the character of Cookie is essentially a caricature of the southern junior matron, similar to Hilly Holbrook in The Help, although Cookie evolves a bit. Most of the other characters are only sketchily drawn.
It is rather risky to use an actual person as a main character in a novel, especially if you are not able to create a character who is convincing as that person. For a much better attempt at using a famous writer as a main character, see Colm Toíbín’s wonderful The Master.
What? Me Read? 