Customer Reviews

A Good Hard Look: A Novel

5 star:		(25)
4 star:		(10)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

A very cleverly written novel about Flannery O'Connor and the town she returned to when she was diagnosed with lupus.

She uses the people of Milledgeville, Georgia, it seems, for the characters in her stories. Cookie Himmel is positive that she is Sabbath Lily from Wise Blood. And she hates Flannery for writing her like that, for being able to see right through to her heart, to who she really is.

Cookie meets her wealthy husband, Melvin Whiteson, in Manhattan just as she is ready to"become an old maid. She would take in stray cats, and possibly turn religious." They return to Milledgeville where Melvin meets Flannery and feels "bad for this young woman trapped on her farm,' crippled with lupus. He agrees one day to let her drive his car and then continues every week, lying to his wife about where he's been. He is intrigued with this woman, Flannery, who refused to small talk; she is interested in getting to the point, asking pointed questions, freely giving her opinion.

This novel is much more than just Flannery O'Connor though;it is about an entire town and Flannery O'Connor.

It is also the story of Lona and the boy, Joe, who she is forced to hire. He goes with her on her sewing errands, measuring, keeping track of appointments. It is story full of many well developed characters, including the infernal peacocks.

As I recounted the novel to my husband, I realized just how complex, convoluted and morally flawed the people were. Just like a Flannery O'Connor novel. Just like Flannery O'Connor herself.

Flannery O'Connor was famous for never letting the ending tidy everything up and Ann Napolitano follows suit.

Flannery O'Connor, the mystic of Milledgeville, Georgia, has been tending her flocks of peacocks elsewhere since 1964, when she died after years of ill health. Her fictions remain uniquely her own -- novels and stories that have inspired a generation of gothic tales and Southern mythologies -- although she herself saw nothing special in her rural life. "Lives spent between the house and the chicken yard do not make exciting copy," she said of herself.

She disliked it when reviewers called her fiction mean or cynical, though her stories often involved transformations through events that are painful and violent. "When I see these stories described as horror stories I am always amused because the reviewer always has hold of the wrong horror," she commented after the publication of her collection "A Good Man is Hard to Find" in 1955. Her fractious, deceptively simple characters come to change by their own beliefs, a hallmark of the author's strong feelings towards her own Catholic faith; her stories are allegories about man's divinity, not lessons about about church doctrine.

Ann Napolitano's "A Good Hard Look" places the author in the center of a story populated with a cast of characters that struggle with their own very human problems, from uncertain marriages to the meddlings of the neighborhood busybody. Unlike O'Connor's outsized and almost freakish fictional misfits, the Milledgeville folks make do with what they've got: mainly, themselves and the rituals of life in a small Georgia town.

O'Connor has her own doubts and insecurities and family issues: the presence of her hard-headed mother Regina gives the author a sense of balance as her health worsens and she begins to wonder if it was a terrible mistake "centering her life on a string of words typed on a page."

Escape from her own fate becomes a theme in the book. Finding a soul-mate in Melvin, who is teaching her to drive, O'Connor thinks of "flashing down the road with a man sitting next to her, that she was someone else, living a normal, contented life." The choices of a normal life are in marked contrast to O'Connor's fictional creations -- the "large and startling figures" that came to life in her stories.

The author was 39 when she died. Napolitano resists the temptation to make O'Connor's life and early death into one of the writer's own fictions -- the folks in Milledgeville are neighbors, after all, not gothic figures. "A Good Hard Look" is a fan's story and a good, inventive tale, one that O'Connor herself might take prickly pride in reading.

The sleepy town of Milledgeville, Georgia, circa 1960, is about to get a colossal wake-up call. Tectonic shifts in social dynamics and behavior will disrupt the civil order of its typically complacent peace. The high-pitched yowls heard at the center of town were previously the exclusive domain of author Flannery O'Connor's peacocks, housed on a 544-acre farm in Andalusia, four miles northwest of the central rural sprawl. Now the muted laments of malcontents and smug inhabitants will create vast cracks in the town's foundation and eclipse the peacock's cries.

The story opens with the shrill, plangent brays of the peacocks intruding on the serenity of Cookie Himmel and her fiancé, Melvin Whiteson, the night before their wedding. Cookie, who is Milledgeville's southern belle beauty and community organizer, met the wealthy Melvin in New York, and brought him back home to start their married life. Cookie and Flannery have a murky past that is revealed in measured increments, furnishing the story with a past that threatens to ambush the future.

The laconic O'Connor, disabled by lupus, manages to fluster Cookie at every opportunity. Complicating matters is the friendly relationship between Melvin and Flannery, commenced at the wedding and growing, despite Cookie's entreaties to her husband to stop seeing the author, her nemesis.

Lona, the compliant wife of policeman and politically aspiring Bill Waters, is a restive soul who sews curtains for the people of Milledgeville, and has recently been hired by Cookie to decorate the windows of the Whiteson mansion. Lona's friendship with the town gossip, Miss Mary, is strengthened by all the years that Mary took care of Lona's daughter, Gigi. Now Miss Mary needs a return favor--for Lona to hire Mary's son, Joe, a quietly troubled but likable high school senior. The plan is for Lona to inveigle Joe to confide his torments to her, in an effort to cure what ails him psychologically.

The first one hundred or so pages are about as bland as the town itself. In retrospect, this is obviously deliberate on Napolitano's part. There is an old-fashioned dowdiness to the language, even a few clichés--yet smartly transacted, despite her prosaicness, to lull the reader into Milledgeville's collective vanilla life. The inclusion of Flannery O'Connor was risky, of course, as an historical individual can be a distracting, dubious force in a fictional story. In this case, however, Flannery's presence is both vital and pivotal.

The stoic purr of Milledgeville cruises along, a little messiness beginning to darken the sky, and the wild grasses of the landscape, almost succumbing to ennui, start to rustle. Abruptly, the sanguinity is blind-sided, and the reader, in a crucial, irreversible moment, is hit by a two-ton truck. And then hurled through the windshield (metaphorically speaking, of course). We are seized from passive observance to pressing pain and tragic immediacy.

What is impressive about Napolitano's craftsmanship is her ability to find the domain between melodrama and verisimilitude, to captivate the reader through phenomenal events that are grounded in authenticity. She does it through the seemingly serviceable prose, her musculature residing in her story. Napolitano, in the final assessment, is a consummate storyteller. She doesn't lose control of her keenly drawn characters once they are covered with the shattered glass of events, stranded on the highway of a broken life. She continues to develop and reveal, develop and reveal, and carries the reader effectively to a genuine conclusion.

There is one crushed relationship that, towards the end, evolves in a way that may be difficult for some readers to accept. Can the shards of tragedy manifest into triumph? Napolitano succeeds in making it plausible, by committing the characters to acute self-examination and opening a valve to redemption. Take a good hard look at sleepy Milledgeville, Georgia, and find a moving, merciful salvation through catastrophic pain and suffering.

Young and beautiful, southern belle Cookie Himmel arrives in Milledgeville, Georgia with her handsome and rich fiance, Melvin Whiteson, in tow. Her triumphant return home is marred by a similar homecoming, although under different circumstances, of Flannery O'Connor. A celebrated author, Flannery returns home after her lupus diagnosis, to live out her life on her mother's farm in Andalusia. Flannery succumbs to her mother's requests and attends Cookie's wedding, where the strange animosity between the two women is immediately evident.

Seeing his new wife blossom in her familiar surroundings, Melvin is determined to make a new start for himself away from the bright lights of New York City and the weight of his family name. Despite his best intentions, his determination leads him to Andalusia and into Flannery's company - a company that he keeps secret from Cookie. He is drawn to her spirit and her honesty, and finds himself examining his own choices in light of her openness.

At the other end of Cookie's social stratosphere, Lona Waters, the quiet wife of a local policeman, helps make ends meet by sewing for the local families. When Cookie hires Lona to sew curtains for her new home, Lona too has the opportunity to examine her choices and to find tenderness where she least expects it.

A Good Hard Look is Ann Napolitano's second novel and is structured around the actual life of Flannery O'Conner. She was in fact diagnosed with lupus at the age of twenty-five and moved home to Andalusia where she continued to write, and to "collect" a large flock of birds. These birds, and specifically peacocks, are featured heavily in the novel; their shrilling cries coincide with momentous occasions in Milledgeville, both good and heartbreakingly bad.

Although I was not sure where A Good Hard Look would take me when I first opened the book, I absolutely loved the journey. I was consistently drawn in by the string of choices made by incredibly real characters, and how those choices shaped their lives after one tragic afternoon.

You know a book is special when five days after completing it, its characters are 'alive' and the story is still spinning in your mind.

"A Good Hard Look" is a novel centered around the life of the the great Southern writer, Flannery O'Connor after she had been forced by lupus to leave New York City and return to her childhood home of Milledgeville, Georgia to be cared for by her mother. The author of this novel, Ann Napolitano, has skillfully interwoven the facts of what is known about Flannery's temperament and what her life was like after returning to Georgia with a cast of mostly fictional characters. Having grown up in Georgia myself in the 1960's, this book breathes authenticity of the place and the era.

As always, I won't be a spoiler and give away the details or ending of this book. That would be cheating readers of a wonderful voyage. What I'd like to do instead is describe the book's impact on me. Digressing for just a moment, many of the characters in this book seem to have little direction and the things they do are not well thought out, if at all. While some of this behavior manifests itself in simply wasted time, in some instances there are terrible consequences. Flannery, on the other hand, knows she has a disease that took away her father and that she has no time to waste or be directionless- she squeezes everything out of the life she has. She wrote feverishly at her mother's farm, with everything she had to give, everything that the lupus hadn't taken away. Every moment mattered for Flannery. And this impacts other characters in the book to take a "good hard look" at the lives they are living, or not living. By the end of the book I was asking myself- am I using all of the life I've been given in a constructive way? am I cherishing it? treating every day like it might be the last? do I have a true direction? The answer sadly is no, and that has been on my mind an awful lot. I have a newfound determination after reading this book to find what really matters to me and to go after it. It's a pretty profound topic for everyone.

This book has so many different angles and dimensions. What one reader takes from it will vary quite a bit from another reader because there's so much in this book. It's about forgiveness, chosen directions, death, love, morality, mental illness, joy and taking "a Good Hard Look"- all in a 300 page book. I'm concerned that might not sound appealing to everyone who is reading this review. If that's the case, I have done a terrible job as a reviewer. This is a timeless book, with unanswerable questions, but a lot of clues. It is a beautifully written novel and it will pull you into each characters' life and you will be sorry when the book ends. In real life, Flannery O'Connor's books often dealt with morality and ethics and the author of this book has tapped into that vein beautifully. Please read "A Good Hard Look". I highly recommend it. It is definitely in my top 10 novels of the last decade.

Nepolitano's book is divided into three distinct and unequal parts. The first section 'Good' introduces and familiarizes us with all that is right in the world of Milledgeville, Georgia.

Cookie Himmel has returned from New York City with a rich fiance in tow and, at her and Melvin's wedding, we are introduced to the various threads of the plot. We meet Miss Mary whose teenage son Joe is gripped with malaise, Lona who is married to a policeman, sews curtains and smokes pot and Flannery (the most famous character in this novel)who Cookie dislikes intensely.

As things progress and relationships form where they, perhaps, have no business forming we see just how much these characters are seeking simply to connect with each other. Events culminate in violence and the newly formed bonds are torn apart.

The second section 'Hard' covers the falling apart of the characters after perceptions of their relationships are destroyed. Without each other to moor them, they flounder.

The final section 'Look' is one of recovery and redemption. The characters see their lives for what they are instead of what they would like to pretend them to be. The novel has a fairly satisfying conclusion.

Surprisingly, I found the most fascinating and beautifully written descriptions to be not of Flannery or even of Cookie and Melvin but instead to be those of Joe and Loma. The words really flowed when the author was writing about these two characters.

The book asks for discussion and interpretation and would be a terrific book club read. There is a lot of beauty in this story and a lot to think about. A Good Hard Look makes you do just that - take a good hard look at the artifices and veils we use to shield ourselves from unpleasant truths.

If asked to recommend a good new book for some worthwhile summer reading, I would without hesitation suggest Ann Napolitano's A Good Hard Look: A Novel.

Set in early 1960's Milledgeville, Georgia, A Good Hard Look: A Novel tells an honest and often heartrending story of personal identity and self-discovery, ambition and one's place in society, pain and suffering, love and loss, guilt and forgiveness, redemption and grace.

The most remarkable feature of Napolitano's engaging storytelling are her imaginative characters. She has captured small town, rural Georgia both accurately and vividly. I lived in rural Georgia in Cherokee County myself for a year and although my experience was forty years later than Napolitano's setting, I could still get that same sense of Georgia Southerners and their southern community structure that I had known, in her version of rural Georgia.

The most extraordinary citizen of Napolitano's Milledgeville is her own characterization of the famous, celebrated author whose hometown was actually Milledgeville, Georgia ~ Flannery O'Connor. And I would have to include Flannery's famous menagerie of birds, particularly her much loved peacocks, as primary characters in A Good Hard Look: A Novel.

Like so many of us, Napolitano first became aware of Flannery O'Connor during her college years when she studied the great writer's vast collection of short stories. Flannery O'Connor is well known for her strong Southern Gothic style of writing, which is bolstered by dark, regional settings and grotesque, morally-flawed characters. Napolitano had also studied other works in Flannery's oeuvre, including essays and personal letters, and as a result of the knowledge she gained about Flannery's personality through these writings, she was able to establish a unique impression of Flannery in her mind. It is this imagined characterization of Flannery O'Connor that Napolitano presents to us in A Good Hard Look: A Novel.

It is essential to approach this novel with that fact in mind, that this is not a biographical portrayal of Flannery O'Connor but an imaginative impression of the author by Ann Napolitano. Nor is Napolitano's style meant to represent or parrot Flannery O'Connor's literary style.

What Napolitano captures luminously in A Good Hard Look: A Novel is Flannery's uncanny grasp of the nuances of human behavior. In reality, Flannery was an extremely devout Roman Catholic who believed fervently in the transformation of human frailties through pain, behavior, even violence. Every soul, no matter how flawed, can be touched by grace. Flannery wrote: "Grace changes us and change is painful." I think Ann Napolitano blended the meaning of that statement beautifully and sensitively into her narrative.

I do have to admit that I found the first 125 pages or so a bit too slow, but slow was indeed the pace in 1960's Georgia. About a third of the way through the novel, when the dramatic tension began to tighten and the plot began to grip did I discover a resonant, relevant theme: "Take a good hard look at who you are and what you have...and then use it."

This statement had a powerful and significant pull on me. I, like Flannery, suffer with an auto-immune disorder, one very much like Flannery's Lupus. I found myself relating to Flannery's message on a personal level. I was greatly moved by this positive propensity in Flannery O'Connor and I was thankful to Ann Napolitano for highlighting this quality of Flannery's character in her novel.

It was then, with a resonance so strong and so clear to me personally, that I could not put A Good Hard Look: A Novel down, turning the pages as fast as I could, all the way to a most satisfying denouement.

A Good Hard Look is a wonderful novel, that grabs hold of the reader from the first page with its beautiful prose. The characters wind themselves in and out of each other melodiously like instruments in the orchestra, each of them coming alive with a burning sense of emerging self that makes the reader long to know more. In fact, on the last page, the reader is saddened to part with everyone, the true goal for a book of real literary value. The author obviously knows a significant amount about the life of Flannery O'Connor, and she blends fact with fiction to create a world that is palpable, bittersweet, filled with ache and longing and bursting at the seams with insight and compassion. A real tour de force.

I read an excellent review of this novel and had to order it from Amazon~It did not disappoint! This is an amazing, can't put down book! The language is stunning and the characters so real you feel like you have live among them all~

I started the book & thought, peacocks? Napolitano uses the bird throughout as an intriguing metaphor & it's original.
But this is simply a great story of pride, lust, fear, hope, good intentions and tragic accidents. Read it in one day, couldn't put it down, still thinking about it...nice job, Ann!