Wise Blood (1952)

When I first read it I didn’t care much for this short novel by Flannery O’Connor, her first. But I read it again recently, for the sake of the lists of 20th-century novels I’m going through, and liked it much more this time. It does shore up a lot of my biases about Southern writers and their strange ways of religion. Yet I could feel—or maybe I read it somewhere—that O’Connor has detectable affection for these oddball nitwits. The main character, Hazel Motes (great name—they’re all great here), has just arrived in the city. It is unspecified but in director John Huston’s 1979 movie version it’s Memphis and that just feels right. “Haze,” as the third-person narrator often calls him, is all fucked up. He has a strong calling to preach, and people see him as a preacher by his manner and dress. He hotly denies that but has plans to preach a “Church Without Christ” message and win a following. He attaches himself to a con man pretending to be blind and his 15-year-old daughter—Asa and Sabbath Weeks. Sabbath has her name because she was born on a Sunday. In turn, a young man barely adult, Enoch Emery, attaches himself to Haze. Enoch believes the “new jesus” exists inside a case in a natural history museum, a preserved corpse. I see now at Wikipedia that Wise Blood can fairly be called a fix-up novel as a handful of O’Connor’s stories, including one from her master’s thesis, are involved. That explains in part, perhaps, why this very short novel feels so packed full of incident and action. But O’Connor also has a sharp and pointed voice, compressing a lot into just a few words. Her dialect is absolutely perfect, with a refreshingly light touch that still conveys all the drawl and twang. It’s not often that dialect is this good. I would not want to live in the world of Wise Blood, but it certainly is worth the visit and I’m glad I gave it another chance. I saw the movie years before I read it even once. Enoch’s pronunciation of “muv-zee-vum” has always stuck with me for some reason—Dan Shor is the performer—and for some reason I really like that it comes directly from the novel. In a way it almost perfectly captures the comical and pathetic yet somehow lovable abject ignorance of these characters. They are all you see here but the kaleidoscope works exceptionally well.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic, which is over. (Library of America)