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The Great Fall 2024 Book Preview
With the arrival of autumn comes a deluge of great books. Here you'll find a sampling of new and forthcoming titles that caught our eye here at The Millions, and that we think might catch yours, too. Some we’ve already perused in galley form; others we’re eager to devour based on their authors, plots, or subject matters. We hope your next fall read is among them.
—Sophia Stewart, editor
October
Season of the Swamp by Yuri Herrera, tr. Lisa Dillman [F]
What it is: An epic, speculative account of the 18 months that Benito Juárez spent in New Orleans in 1853-54, years before he became the first and only Indigenous president of Mexico.
Who it's for: Fans of speculative history; readers who appreciate the magic that swirls around any novel set in New Orleans. —Claire Kirch
The Black Utopians by Aaron Robertson [NF]
What it is: An exploration of Black Americans' pursuit and visions of utopia—both ideological and physical—that spans the Reconstruction era to the present day and combines history, memoir, and reportage.
Who it's for: Fans of Saidiya Hartman's Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments and Kristen R. Ghodsee's Everyday Utopia. —Sophia M. Stewart
The Third Realm by Karl Ove Knausgaard, tr. Martin Aitken [F]
What it is: The third installment in Knausgaard's Morning Star series, centered on the appearance of a mysterious new star in the skies above Norway.
Who it's for: Real Knausgaard heads only—The Wolves of Eternity and Morning Star are required reading for this one. —SMS
Brown Women Have Everything by Sayantani Dasgupta [NF]
What it is: Essays on the contradictions and complexities of life as an Indian woman in America, probing everything from hair to family to the joys of travel.
Who it's for: Readers of Durga Chew-Bose, Erika L. Sánchez, and Tajja Isen. —SMS
The Plot Against Native America by Bill Vaughn [F]
What it is: The first narrative history of Native American boarding schools— which aimed "civilize" Indigenous children by violently severing them from their culture— and their enduring, horrifying legacy.
Who it's for: Readers of Ned Blackhawk and Kathleen DuVal. —SMS
The Mighty Red by Louise Erdrich [F]
What it is: Erdrich's latest novel set in North Dakota's Red River Valley is a tale of the intertwined lives of ordinary people striving to survive and even thrive in their rural community, despite environmental upheavals, the 2008 financial crisis, and other obstacles.
Who it's for: Readers of cli-fi; fans of Linda LeGarde Grover and William Faulkner. —CK
The Position of Spoons by Deborah Levy [NF]
What it is: The second book from Levy in as many years, diverging from a recent streak of surrealist fiction with a collection of essays marked by exceptional observance and style.
Who it's for: Close lookers and the perennially curious. —John H. Maher
The Bog Wife by Kay Chronister [F]
What it's about: The Haddesley family has lived on the same West Virginia bog for centuries, making a supernatural bargain with the land—a generational blood sacrifice—in order to do so—until an uncovered secret changes everything.
Who it's for: Readers of Karen Russell and Jeff VanderMeer; anyone who has ever used the phrase "girl moss." —SMS
The Great When by Alan Moore [F]
What it's about: When an 18-year old book reseller comes across a copy of a book that shouldn’t exist, it threatens to upend not just an already post-war-torn London, but reality as we know it.
Who it's for: Anyone looking for a Sherlock Holmes-style mystery dipped in thaumaturgical psychedelia. —Daniella Fishman
The Message by Ta-Nehisi Coates [NF]
What it's about: One of our sharpest critical thinkers on social justice returns to nonfiction, nearly a decade after Between the World and Me, visiting Dakar, to contemplate enslavement and the Middle Passage; Columbia, S.C., as a backdrop for his thoughts on Jim Crow and book bans; and the Israeli-occupied West Bank, where he sees contemporary segregation in the treatment of Palestinians.
Who it’s for: Fans of James Baldwin, George Orwell, and Angela Y. Davis; readers of Nikole Hannah-Jones’s The 1619 Project and Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste, to name just a few engagements with national and racial identity. —Nathalie op de Beeck
Abortion by Jessica Valenti [NF]
What it is: Columnist and memoirist Valenti, who tracks pro-choice advocacy and attacks on the right to choose in her Substack, channels feminist rage into a guide for freedom of choice advocacy.
Who it’s for: Readers of Robin Marty’s The New Handbook for a Post-Roe America, #ShoutYourAbortion proponents, and followers of Jennifer Baumgartner’s [I Had an Abortion] project. —NodB
Gifted by Suzuki Suzumi, tr. Allison Markin Powell [F]
What it's about: A young sex worker in Tokyo's red-light district muses on her life and recounts her abusive mother's final days, in what is Suzuki's first novel to be translated into English.
Who it's for: Readers of Susan Boyt and Mieko Kanai; fans of moody, introspective fiction; anyone with a fraught relationship to their mother. —SMS
Childish Literature by Alejandro Zambra, tr. Megan McDowell [F]
What it is: A wide-ranging collection of stories, essays, and poems that explore childhood, fatherhood, and family.
Who it's for: Fans of dad lit (see: Lucas Mann's Attachments, Keith Gessen's Raising Raffi, Karl Ove Knausgaard's seasons quartet, et al). —SMS
Books Are Made Out of Books ed. Michael Lynn Crews [NF]
What it is: A mining of the archives of the late Cormac McCarthy with a focus on the famously tight-lipped author's literary influences.
Who it's for: Anyone whose commonplace book contains the words "arquebus," "cordillera," or "vinegaroon." —JHM
Slaveroad by John Edgar Wideman [F]
What it is: A blend of memoir, fiction, and history that charts the "slaveroad" that runs through American history, spanning the Atlantic slave trade to the criminal justice system, from the celebrated author of Brothers and Keepers.
Who it's for: Fans of Clint Smith and Ta-Nehisi Coates. —SMS
Linguaphile by Julie Sedivy [NF]
What it's about: Linguist Sedivy reflects on a life spent loving language—its beauty, its mystery, and the essential role it plays in human existence.
Who it's for: Amateur (or professional) linguists; fans of the podcast A Way with Words (me). —SMS
An Image of My Name Enters America by Lucy Ives [NF]
What it is: A collection of interrelated essays that connect moments from Ives's life to larger questions of history, identity, and national fantasy,
Who it's for: Fans of Ives, one of our weirdest and most wondrous living writers—duh; anyone with a passing interest in My Little Pony, Cold War–era musicals, or The Three Body Problem, all of which are mined here for great effect. —SMS
Women's Hotel by Daniel Lavery [F]
What it is: A novel set in 1960s New York City, about the adventures of the residents of a hotel providing housing for young women that is very much evocative of the real-life legendary Barbizon Hotel.
Who it's for: Readers of Mary McCarthy's The Group and Rona Jaffe's The Best of Everything. —CK
The World in Books by Kenneth C. Davis [NF]
What it is: A guide to 52 of the most influential works of nonfiction ever published, spanning works from Plato to Ida B. Wells, bell hooks to Barbara Ehrenreich, and Sun Tzu to Joan Didion.
Who it's for: Lovers of nonfiction looking to cover their canonical bases. —SMS
Blue Light Hours by Bruna Dantas Lobato [F]
What it's about: Through the emanating blue-glow of their computer screens, a mother and daughter, four-thousand miles apart, find solace and loneliness in their nightly Skype chats in this heartstring-pulling debut.
Who it's for: Someone who needs to be reminded to CALL YOUR MOTHER! —DF
Riding Like the Wind by Iris Jamahl Dunkle [NF]
What it is: The biography of Sanora Babb, a contemporary of John Steinbeck's whose field notes and interviews with Dust Bowl migrants Steinbeck relied upon to write The Grapes of Wrath.
Who it's for: Steinbeck fans and haters alike; readers of Kristin Hannah's The Four Winds and the New York Times Overlooked column; anyone interested in learning more about the Dust Bowl migrants who fled to California hoping for a better life. —CK
Innie Shadows by Olivia M. Coetzee [F]
What it is: a work of crime fiction set on the outskirts of Cape Town, where a community marred by violence seeks justice and connection; also the first novel to be translated from Kaaps, a dialect of Afrikaans that was until recently only a spoken language.
Who it's for: fans of sprawling, socioeconomically-attuned crime dramas a la The Wire. —SMS
Dorothy Parker in Hollywood by Gail Crowther [NF]
What it is: A history of the famous wit—and famous New Yorker—in her L.A. era, post–Algonquin Round Table and mid–Red Scare.
Who it's for: Owners of a stack of hopelessly dog-eared Joan Didion paperbacks. —JHM
The Myth of American Idealism by Noam Chomsky and Nathan J. Robinson [NF]
What it is: A potent critique of the ideology behind America's foreign interventions and its status as a global power, and an treatise on how the nation's hubristic pursuit of "spreading democracy" threatens not only the delicate balance of global peace, but the already-declining health of our planet.
Who it's for: Chomskyites; policy wonks and casual critics of American recklessness alike. —DF
Mysticism by Simon Critchley [NF]
What it is: A study of mysticism—defined as an experience, rather than religious practice—by the great British philosopher Critchley, who mines music, poetry, and literature along the way.
Who it's for: Readers of John Gray, Jorge Luis Borges, and Simone Weil. —SMS
Q&A by Adrian Tomine [NF]
What it is: The Japanese American creator of the Optic Nerve comic book series for D&Q, and of many a New Yorker cover, shares his personal history and his creative process in this illustrated unburdening.
Who it’s for: Readers of Tomine’s melancholic, sometimes cringey, and occasionally brutal collections of comics short stories including Summer Blonde, Shortcomings, and Killing and Dying. —NodB
Sonny Boy by Al Pacino [NF]
What it is: Al Pacino's memoir—end of description.
Who it's for: Cinephiles; anyone curious how he's gonna spin fumbling Diane Keaton. —SMS
Seeing Baya by Alice Kaplan [NF]
What it is: The first biography of the enigmatic and largely-forgotten Algerian artist Baya Mahieddine, who first enchanted midcentury Paris as a teenager.
Who it's for: Admirers of Leonora Carrington, Hilma af Klint, Frida Kahlo, and other belatedly-celebrated women painters. —SMS
Absolution by Jeff VanderMeer [F]
What it is: A surprise return to the Area X, the stretch of unforbidding and uncanny coastline in the hit Southern Reach trilogy.
Who it's for: Anyone who's heard this song and got the reference without Googling it. —JHM
The Four Horsemen by Nick Curtola [NF]
What it is: The much-anticipated cookbook from the team behind Brooklyn's hottest restaurant (which also happens to be co-owned by James Murphy of LCD Soundsystem).
Who it's for: Oenophiles; thirty-somethings who live in north Williamsburg (derogatory). —SMS
Seeing Further by Esther Kinsky, tr. Caroline Schmidt [F]
What it's about: An unnamed German woman embarks on the colossal task of reviving a cinema in a small Hungarian village.
Who it's for: Fans of Jenny Erpenbeck; anyone charmed by Cinema Paradiso (not derogatory!). —SMS
Ripcord by Nate Lippens [NF]
What it's about: A novel of class, sex, friendship, and queer intimacy, written in delicious prose and narrated by a gay man adrift in Milwaukee.
Who it's for: Fans of Brontez Purnell, Garth Greenwell, Alexander Chee, and Wayne Koestenbaum. —SMS
The Use of Photography by Annie Ernaux and Marc Marie, tr. Alison L. Strayer [NF]
What it's about: Ernaux's love affair with Marie, a journalist, while she was undergoing treatment for cancer, and their joint project to document their romance.
Who it's for: The Ernaux hive, obviously; readers of Sontag's On Photography and Janet Malcolm's Still Pictures. —SMS
Nora Ephron at the Movies by Ilana Kaplan [NF]
What it is: Kaplan revisits Nora Ephron's cinematic watersheds—Silkwood, Heartburn, When Harry Met Sally, You've Got Mail, and Sleepless in Seattle—in this illustrated book. Have these iconic stories, and Ephron’s humor, weathered more than 40 years?
Who it’s for: Film history buffs who don’t mind a heteronormative HEA; listeners of the Hot and Bothered podcast; your coastal grandma. —NodB
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The Philosophy of Translation by Damion Searls [NF]
What it is: A meditation on the act and art of translation by one of today's most acclaimed practitioners, best known for his translations of Fosse, Proust, et al.
Who it's for: Regular readers of Words Without Borders and Asymptote; professional and amateur literary translators alike. —SMS
Salvage by Dionne Brand
What it is: A penetrating reevaluation of the British literary canon and the tropes once shaped Brand's reading life and sense of self—and Brand’s first major work of nonfiction since her landmark A Map to the Door of No Return.
Who it's for: Readers of Christina Sharpe's Ordinary Notes and Elizabeth Hardwick's Seduction and Betrayal. —SMS
Masquerade by Mike Fu [F]
What it's about: Housesitting for an artist friend in present-day New York, Meadow Liu stumbles on a novel whose author shares his name—the first of many strange, haunting happenings that lead up to the mysterious disappearance of Meadow's friend.
Who it's for: fans of Ed Park and Alexander Chee. —SMS
November
The Beggar Student by Osamu Dazai, tr. Sam Bett [F]
What it is: A novella in the moody vein of Dazai’s acclaimed No Longer Human, following the 30-something “fictional” Dazai into another misadventure spawned from a hubristic spat with a high schooler.
Who it's for: Longtime readers of Dazai, or new fans who discovered the midcentury Japanese novelist via TikTok and the Bungo Stray Dogs anime. —DF
In Thrall by Jane DeLynn [F]
What it is: A landmark lesbian bildungsroman about 16-year-old Lynn's love affair with her English teacher, originally published in 1982.
Who it's for: Fans of Joanna Russ's On Strike Against God and Edmund White's A Boy's Own Story —SMS
Washita Love Child by Douglas Kent Miller [NF]
What it is: The story of Jesse Ed Davis, the Indigenous musician who became on of the most sought after guitarists of the late '60s and '70s, playing alongside B.B. King, Bob Dylan, John Lennon, and more.
Who it's for: readers of music history and/or Indigenous history; fans of Joy Harjo, who wrote the foreword. —SMS
Set My Heart on Fire by Izumi Suzuki, tr. Helen O'Horan [F]
What it is: Gritty, sexy, and wholly rock ’n’ roll, Suzuki’s first novel translated into English (following her story collection, Hit Parade of Tears) follows 20-year-old Izumi navigating life, love, and music in the underground scene in '70s Japan.
Who it's for: Fans of Meiko Kawakami, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Marlowe Granados's Happy Hour. —DF
Didion & Babitz by Lili Anolik [NF]
What it is: A dual portrait of Joan Didion and Eve Babitz, who are so often compared to—and pitted against—each other on the basis of their mutual Los Angeles milieu.
Who it's for: Fans or haters of either writer (the book is fairly pro-Babitz, often at Didion's expense); anyone who has the Lit Hub Didion tote bag. —SMS
The Endless Refrain by David Rowell [NF]
What it's about: How the rise of music streaming, demonitizing of artist revenue, and industry tendency toward nostalgia have laid waste to the musical landscape, and the future of music culture.
Who it's for: Fans of Kyle Chayka, Spence Kornhaber, and Lindsay Zoladz. —SMS
Every Arc Bends Its Radian by Sergio De La Pava [F]
What it is: A mind- and genre-bending detective story set in Cali, Colombia, that blends high-stakes suspense with rigorous philosophy.
Who it's for: Readers of Raymond Chandler, Thomas Pynchon, and Jules Verne. —SMS
Something Close to Nothing by Tom Pyun [F]
What it’s about: At the airport with his white husband Jared, awaiting a flight to Cambodia to meet the surrogate mother carrying their adoptive child-to-be, Korean American Wynn decides parenthood isn't for him, and bad behavior ensues.
Who it’s for: Pyun’s debut is calculated to cut through saccharine depictions of queer parenthood—could pair well with Torrey Peters’s Detransition, Baby. —NodB
Rosenfeld by Maya Kessler [F]
What it is: Kessler's debut—rated R for Rosenfeld—follows one Noa Simmons through the tumultuous and ultimately profound power play that is courting (and having a lot of sex with) the titular older man who soon becomes her boss.
Who it's for: Fans of Sex and the City, Raven Leilani’s Luster, and Coco Mellor’s Cleopatra and Frankenstein. —DF
Lazarus Man by Richard Price [F]
What it is: The former The Wire writer offers yet another astute chronicle of urban life, this time of an ever-changing Harlem.
Who it's for: Fans of Colson Whitehead's Crook Manifesto and Paul Murray's The Bee Sting—and, of course, The Wire. —SMS
Stranger Than Fiction by Edwin Frank [NF]
What it is: An astute curveball of a read on the development and many manifestations of the novel throughout the tumultuous 20th century.
Who it's for: Readers who look at a book's colophon before its title. —JHM
Letters to His Neighbor by Marcel Proust, tr. Lydia Davis
What it is: A collection of Proust’s tormented—and frequently hilarious—letters to his noisy neighbor which, in a diligent translation from Davis, stand the test of time.
Who it's for: Proust lovers; people who live below heavy-steppers. —DF
Context Collapse by Ryan Ruby [NF]
What it is: A self-proclaimed "poem containing a history of poetry," from ancient Greece to the Iowa Workshop, from your favorite literary critic's favorite literary critic.
Who it's for: Anyone who read and admired Ruby's titanic 2022 essay on The Waste Land; lovers of poetry looking for a challenge. —SMS
How Sondheim Can Change Your Life by Richard Schoch [NF]
What it's about: Drama professor Schoch's tribute to Stephen Sondheim and the life lessons to be gleaned from his music.
Who it's for: Sondheim heads, former theater kids, end of list. —SMS
The Serviceberry by Robin Wall Kimmerer [NF]
What it is: 2022 MacArthur fellow and botanist Kimmerer, an enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, (re)introduces audiences to a flowering, fruiting native plant beloved of foragers and gardeners.
Who it’s for: The restoration ecologist in your life, along with anyone who loved Braiding Sweetgrass and needs a nature-themed holiday gift. —NodB
My Heart Belongs in an Empty Big Mac Container Buried Beneath the Ocean Floor by Homeless [F]
What it is: A pseudonymous, tenderly comic novel of blue whales and Golden Arches, mental illness and recovery.
Who it's for: Anyone who finds Thomas Pynchon a bit too staid. —JHM
Yoke and Feather by Jessie van Eerden [NF]
What it's about: Van Eerden's braided essays explore the "everyday sacred" to tease out connections between ancient myth and contemporary life.
Who it's for: Readers of Courtney Zoffness's Spilt Milk and Jeanna Kadlec's Heretic. —SMS
Camp Jeff by Tova Reich [F]
What it's about: A "reeducation" center for sex pests in the Catskills, founded by one Jeffery Epstein (no, not that one), where the dual phenomena of #MeToo and therapyspeak collide.
Who it's for: Fans of Philip Roth and Nathan Englander; cancel culture skeptics. —SMS
Selected Amazon Reviews by Kevin Killian [NF]
What it is: A collection of 16 years of Killian’s funniest, wittiest, and most poetic Amazon reviews, the sheer number of which helped him earn the rarefied “Top 100” and “Hall of Fame” status on the site.
Who it's for: Fans of Wayne Koestenbaum and Dodie Bellamy, who wrote introduction and afterword, respectively; people who actually leave Amazon reviews. —DF
Cher by Cher [NF]
What it is: The first in a two-volume memoir, telling the story of Cher's early life and ascendent career as only she can tell it.
Who it's for: Anyone looking to fill the My Name Is Barbra–sized hole in their heart, or looking for something to tide them over until the Liza memoir drops. —SMS
The City and Its Uncertain Walls by Haruki Murakami, tr. Philip Gabriel [F]
What it is: Murakami’s first novel in over six years returns to the high-walled city from his 1985 story "Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World" with one man's search for his lost love—and, simultaneously, an ode to libraries and literature itself.
Who it's for: Murakami fans who have long awaited his return to fiction. —DF
American Bulk by Emily Mester [NF]
What it's about: Reflecting on what it means to "live life to the fullest," Mester explores the cultural and personal impacts of America’s culture of overconsumption, from Costco hauls to hoarding to diet culture—oh my!
Who it's for: Lovers of sustainability; haters of excess; skeptics of the title essay of Becca Rothfeld's All Things Are Too Small. —DF
The Icon and the Idealist by Stephanie Gorton [NF]
What it is: A compelling look at the rivalry between Margaret Sanger, of Planned Parenthood fame, and Mary Ware Dennett, who each held radically different visions for the future of birth control.
Who it's for: Readers of Amy Sohn's The Man Who Hated Women and Katherine Turk's The Women of NOW; anyone interested in the history of reproductive rights. —SMS
December
Rental House by Weike Wang [F]
What it's about: Married college sweethearts invite their drastically different families on a Cape Code vacation, raising questions about marriage, intimacy, and kinship.
Who it's for: Fans of Wang's trademark wit and sly humor (see: Joan Is Okay and Chemistry); anyone with an in-law problem.
Woo Woo by Ella Baxter [F]
What it's about: A neurotic conceptual artist loses her shit in the months leading up to an exhibition that she hopes will be her big breakout, poking fun at the tropes of the "art monster" and the "woman of the verge" in one fell, stylish swoop.
Who it's for: Readers of Sheena Patel's I'm a Fan and Chris Kraus's I Love Dick; any woman who is grateful to but now also sort of begrudges Jenny Offil for introducing "art monster" into the lexicon (me). —SMS
Berlin Atomized by Julia Kornberg, tr. Jack Rockwell and Julia Kornberg [F]
What it's about: Spanning 2001 to 2034, three Jewish and downwardly mobile siblings come of age in various corners of the world against the backdrop of global crisis.
Who it's for: Fans of Catherine Lacey's Biography of X and Joshua Cohen's The Netanyahus. —SMS
Sand-Catcher by Omar Khalifah, tr. Barbara Romaine [F]
What it is: A suspenseful, dark satire of memory and nation, in which four young Palestinian journalists at a Jordanian newspaper are assigned to interview an elderly witness to the Nakba, the violent 1948 expulsion of native Palestinians from Israel—but to their surprise, the survivor doesn’t want to rehash his trauma for the media.
Who it’s for: Anyone looking insight—tinged with grim humor—into the years leading up to the present political crisis in the Middle East and the decades-long goal of Palestinian autonomy. —NodB
The Shutouts by Gabrielle Korn [F]
What it's about: In the dystopian future, mysteriously connected women fight to survive on the margins of society amid worsening climate collapse.
Who it's for: Fans of Korn's Yours for the Taking, which takes place in the same universe; readers of Becky Chambers and queer-inflected sci-fi. —SMS
What in Me Is Dark by Orlando Reade [NF]
What it's about: The enduring, evolving influence of Milton's Paradise Lost on political history—and particularly on the work of 12 revolutionary readers, including Malcom X and Hannah Arendt.
Who it's for: English majors and fans of Ryan Ruby and Sarah Bakewell—but I repeat myself. —SMS
The Afterlife Is Letting Go by Brandon Shimoda [NF]
What it's about: Shimoda researches the mass incarceration of Japanese Americans during WWII, and speaks with descendants of those imprisoned, for this essay collection about the “afterlife” of cruelty and xenophobia in the U.S.
Who it’s for: Anyone to ever visit a monument, museum, or designated site of hallowed ground where traumatic events have taken place. —NodB
No Place to Bury the Dead by Karina Sainz Borgo, tr. Elizabeth Bryer [F]
What it's about: When Angustias Romero loses both her children while fleeing a mysterious disease in her unnamed Latin American country, she finds herself in a surreal, purgatorial borderland where she's soon caught in a power struggle.
Who it's for: Fans of Maríana Enriquez and Mohsin Hamid. —SMS
The Rest Is Silence by Augusto Monterroso, tr. Aaron Kerner [F]
What it is: The author of some of the shortest, and tightest, stories in Latin American literature goes long with a metafictional skewering of literary criticism in his only novel.
Who it's for: Anyone who prefers the term "palm-of-the-hand stories" to "flash fiction." —JHM
Tali Girls by Siamak Herawi, tr. Sara Khalili [F]
What it is: An intimate, harrowing, and vital look at the lives of girls and women in an Afghan mountain village under Taliban rule, based on true stories.
Who it's for: Readers of Nadia Hashimi, Akwaeke Emezi, and Maria Stepanova. —SMS
Sun City by Tove Jansson, tr. Thomas Teal [F]
What it's about: During her travels through the U.S. in the 1970s, Jansson became interested in the retirement home as a peculiarly American institution—here, she imagines the tightly knit community within one of them.
Who it's for: Fans of Jansson's other fiction for adults, much of which explores the lives of elderly folks; anyone who watched that documentary about The Villages in Florida. —SMS
Editor's note: We're always looking to make our seasonal book previews more useful to the readers, writers, and critics they're meant to serve. Got an idea for how we can improve our coverage? Tell me about it at sophia@themillions.com.
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My Adventures in Hell
1.
Two miles from my childhood home in Burke, Va., is a slice of shoulder along the Fairfax County Parkway. It’s an unassuming patch of asphalt, easily overshadowed by the sports fields stretching behind it, the recreation center in the middle distance where I first learned how to swim, how to keep my head above water without drowning. Still, every time I pass that simple strip of earth on the way to visit my parents for dinner, I slow down as much as traffic will allow. I look for the ghost of a busted brown Buick and, in the backseat, the ghost of a boy who’s just told his father he doesn’t believe in Hell.
Ours was a multi-religious household, which meant Sundays were often split between the area’s community churches (Methodist, Unitarian) and the Islamic community center to which my father, a Muslim who nevertheless wanted his children to think of all religions as inherently the same, was especially dedicated. It was, after all, his culture. I loathed these trips: how he’d make me—never my younger sisters—recite Quranic verses in Arabic; how he’d lecture about God, about prophets and angels, about devils and Hell, as if we were students in a seminary or madrassa. I wanted nothing to do with these conversations, not out of some fervent belief in atheism (that wouldn’t arrive until college) so much as resentment that my other friends, from whose lives God seemed absent, never went anywhere on Sundays.
On one particular drive, which my poor memory can only consign to sometime in the early 1990s, I interrupted my father during one of his talks and told him, apropos of nothing other than to see how he would react, that I didn’t think Hell was real.
The car rushed off the parkway. We jerked to a stop on the shoulder. My father turned around to look at me (it was my youngest sister’s turn in the front passenger seat). He aimed his index finger, raised his voice to tyrannical levels. He screamed my name and asked whether or not I wanted to go to the mosque.
It was, of course, a rhetorical question. The answer was no, but I didn’t say that. I was no Miltonian Lucifer; I had no romantic verses prepared, no winged rebels to back up my proclamation of non serviam. I was just a pre-teen boy churning the waters typical of bi-racial, bi-cultural children in America. So I said yes: yes, I did want to go to the mosque; I did believe in Hell. We lingered on the parkway shoulder in the silence my father used to express his anger, like the terrifying calm between two claps of thunder. Then he checked his side mirror, slipped back out onto the road, and we continued on to the Islamic community center where I’d spend the majority of Sundays until my senior year of high school.
2.
Hell was both the most terrifying and most fascinating aspect of my religious education. Good people went to Heaven; bad people went to Hell. Heaven was clouds and wings and relatives; Hell was fire and monsters and Adolf Hitler. These were simple, obvious truths, tailor-made for a child’s mind.
It was the fire that stuck with me most. The “unquenchable fire” from the Book of Luke, the “lake of fire and brimstone” from the Book of Revelation, the “companions of the Fire” in the Quran’s seventh surah. The relationship between fire and Hell added a strange weight to the fires of my everyday life. I couldn’t help but think about Hell every time I saw a crackling fireplace, every time I heard the scratch of a match over unlit birthday candles. What would it be like to burn forever, with no reprieve? Would it feel like a melting marshmallow? Would it feel like my father’s pizza crust blackening on the grill? Eternal conflagrations—how could one stand to think about it? How could one stand not to think about it?
Then, in fourth grade, I learned it wasn’t fire I should be worried about but nothingness. I was in my first year at a public school after three years at a private Islamic academy. My two new friends were both Italian, both Catholic, both adamant that, because I wasn’t baptized as a child, because a priest had never poured holy water over my forehead, I wasn’t even worthy of Hell. Unbaptized children went to a place called Limbo. I had no idea where they’d learned this and, as a nine year old with a fertile imagination, I didn’t think about asking. The terror was enough confirmation for me.
Soon, baptism became a necessity. Not out of a desire to embrace Catholicism but as an insurance plan for my soul. I asked my parents if I could get baptized (though I didn’t say why). My father shook his head; my mother laughed. I wasn’t going to Hell, they said. Or Limbo, for that matter. I was a good person. And I think I knew I was.
Still. It was impossible for me not to stare sometimes at my friends’ foreheads through their fangs of red and black hair, cleaned of something mine wasn’t. Imagining roaring fire, hot pits—that was taxing enough. But Limbo? A place of nothingness, outside Hell proper? All I could think of was a cold, lightless room in which I was stuck, out of sight and out of mind.
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3.
Years later, well into high school, I’d encounter Limbo again through the imagination of a Florentine poet with his own peculiar obsessions about the mechanics and bureaucracy of Hell.
By this time, my fear of eternal punishment (whether through fire or total absence), had mutated into a voyeuristic love of violence. I was slowly growing more dubious about Hell’s literal existence—but more engrossed by the spectacles of violence it suggested. Violent comic books (Sin City, Preacher), violent films (Se7en, Pulp Fiction), the violent short stories I’d co-author with a friend on my parents’ basement computer: there was a perverse exhilaration in these new preoccupations. I wish I could say that my intentions were noble, that I was on a mission to expose and critique humanity’s capacity for cruelty; in truth, I just wanted to bathe my imagination in blood and guts.
With this same friend, I’d often cull online encyclopedias for strange and interesting stories and facts (the more violent the better). It was in this manner that we discovered Dante’s Inferno, and there it was, what Virgil refers to (in Robert Pinsky’s 1994 translation) as “the sightless zone”:
…Here we encountered
No laments that we could hear—except for sighs
That trembled the timeless air: they emanated
From the shadowy sadnesses, not agonies,
Of multitudes of children and women and men.
Beyond Limbo, I was astounded by the awful poetry of these punishments, at the gore of the medieval imagination. The twisted necks of fraudulent sorcerers and diviners in Canto XX, their bodies “so grotesquely reshaped, / Contorted so the eyes’ tears fell to wet / The buttocks at the cleft.” The prophet Muhammad in Canto XXVIII, “split open from his chin / Down to the farting-place, and from the splayed / Trunk the spilled entrails dangled between his thighs.” And, of course, the culminating image of horror: Satan himself, a multi-faced, multi-winged beast at the bottom of Hell munching Judas, Brutus, and Cassius as if they were sticks of celery.
To say nothing of the illustrations in the various translations I browsed through at the public library and online, giving weight to my own imagination. The muddy nightmares by Michael Mazur. The graceful etchings of Gustave Doré. The bloodless (and therefore, to my teenage self, boring) watercolors of William Blake. There was also my own embarrassing contribution to this visual canon, in response to an assignment for a young-adult class at the Islamic community center for which we were asked to draw something from the Quran: a cartoon man bracketed by flames, mouth open in agony, eyes near to bursting with terror.
4.
A fear of Hell isn’t innate. Rather, like other destructive social ideas, it’s something we’re groomed to believe in from an early age. While I’d slowly begun to realize this, to weigh Hell’s contradictory descriptions against one another and find them wanting, the idea sharpened when I encountered, in 12th-grade honors English class, the third chapter of James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.
Father Arnall’s seemingly interminable sermon to Stephen Dedalus and the other boys during a religious retreat shocked me with not just its horror but its fanaticism. In excruciating detail, Father Arnall lays bare the sensory details of Hell’s torments:
Every sense of the flesh is tortured and every faculty of the soul therewith: the eyes with impenetrable utter darkness, the noise with noisome odours, the ears with yells and howls and execrations, the taste with foul matter, leprous corruption, nameless suffocating filth, the touch with redhot goads and spikes, with cruel tongues of flame. And through the several torments of the senses the immortal soul is tortured eternally in its very essence amid the leagues upon leagues of glowing fires kindled in the abyss by the offended majesty of the Omnipotent God and fanned into everlasting and ever increasing fury by the breath of the anger of the Godhead.
One can almost envision Father Arnall’s teeth gnashing as he speaks, froth bubbling at the corners of his lips. It’s a moment that strikes me now as bordering on the epileptic, the orgasmic. Above all, it’s about fear as a teaching tool, as a way to regulate moral behavior. It is, as Christopher Hitchens describes it in God Is Not Great, “one of the great instances of moral terrorism in our literature.”
Father Arnall would undoubtedly find much in common with the very real (and appropriately named) John Furniss, a 19th-century Catholic priest whose pamphlet, The Sight of Hell, explicates the sensations of Hell for the instruction of young children. (Some chapters: “Where Is Hell?,” “How Far It Is to Hell,” “The Smell of Death,” “A Bed of Fire,” “The Dungeons of Hell.”). For precocious children wondering what an eternity of punishment feels like, Furniss has surprising first-hand information:
Think that a man in Hell cries only one single tear in ten hundred million years. Tell me how many millions of years must pass before he fills a little basin with his tears? How many millions of years must pass before he cries as many tears as there were drops of water at the deluge? How many years must pass before he has drowned the heavens and earth with his tears? Is this Eternity? No.
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5.
I can’t imagine what it would have been like to read Furniss’s words as a child, back when I was susceptible to taking such images, such ideas seriously. Like many childhood preoccupations, my terror of Hell strikes me now, as a 36-year-old atheist, as mind-boggling. After decades of encountering Hell and its ilk in everything from the “house of dust” of the ancient Mesopotamians to the blasted landscapes of Hieronymus Bosch and Pieter Bruegel the Elder, the place has become nothing more than a curiosity, a place of imaginative exploration no more real than Narnia. The punchline to a cruel joke.
It was with this mindset that I recently indulged in The Penguin Book of Hell, in which Scott G. Bruce excerpts Western visions of punishment stretching from the days of Hesiod and Plato to the Hells of our own making in the concentration camps and rendition sites of the modern world. I read the book with a palpable sense of nostalgia for my own innocence, my old voyeurism. I made a point to do the bulk of my reading on Sunday mornings when, as a child, I would have been trapped in a Buick on the way to an education I didn’t have the words or courage to protest. This is the dark side of wisdom, I suppose: that the knowledge gained often comes too late to change the past when it mattered most.
I’ve long since made my atheism known to my father, who’s mellowed in recent years. I fling casual arguments against the existence of God at him like confetti. He shrugs them off. Perhaps he’s that unwavering in his beliefs. Or maybe he’s given up trying to mold me, now that I’m at an age where I decide whether or not I want to get into a car, where I get to choose how to spend my Sundays.
And the Catholic kids from elementary school with their cautionary tales of Limbo? I don’t think about my forehead, or theirs, any longer. One of them has gone off to his own life; when we reconnect, none of our conversations revolve around anything so serious. The other one died in 2002, hit by a car on his college campus. We weren’t close, but it was the first death of someone I knew and so it lingered with me—and sometimes still does. Did that water poured over his head as a baby save his soul? Did it ensure his entrance into a better place than this world? I imagine his family thinks so. As for me, I don’t know where he is. But I know where he isn’t.
Image: Wikimedia.
Mystery and Manners: On Teaching Flannery O’Connor
1.
Flannery O'Connor earned her undergraduate degree in social sciences at Georgia State College for Women, a teachers’ college. O'Connor considered that career, but was “rather glad things didn't work out that way." She entered the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and the rest is literary history.
Although O’Connor admitted that she was “in a state of pristine innocence” when it came to teaching, she had many opinions about the profession. In “The Teaching of Literature,” an address to English teachers later collected into an essay, O’Connor assails the “utilitarian” approach of doctoral studies in English, where it is assumed that novels “must do something, rather than be something.” She expects more of English teachers, who are “a sort of middle-man” in the “standing dispute between the novelist and the public.” Aimee Bender says O'Connor's voice "often has a scolding edge,” but teachers at all levels would do well to listen.
In O’Connor’s experience, teachers often fell short of helping students see that the “business of fiction [is] to embody mystery through manners, and mystery is a great embarrassment to the modern mind.” Her words were a Southern, Irish-Catholic take on a phrase from The Ivory Tower, an unfinished novel by Henry James. For O’Connor, “the mystery he was talking about is the mystery of our position on earth, and the manners are those conventions which, in the hands of the artist, reveal that central mystery.”
Her own teachers found ways to “ignore the nature of literature” by instead discussing literary history, examining the psychology of the author, or considering a work’s social application, as if it were a policy document. In fact, if a teacher were “astute and energetic,” she could “integrate English literature with geography, biology, home economics, basketball, or fire prevention — with anything at all that will put off a little longer the evil day when the story or novel must be examined simply as a story or novel.”
Halfway through “The Teaching of Literature,” O’Connor stops talking about instruction and begins talking about the real focus of her discussion, something that sounds very close to her own work: “Possibly the question most often asked these days about modern fiction is why do we keep on getting novels about freaks and poor people, engaged always in some violent, destructive action, when, actually, in this country, we are rich and strong and democratic and the man in the street is possessed of a general good-will which overflows in all directions.” O’Connor rejects such a sensibility that attempts to “separate mystery from manners in fiction, and thereby to make it more palatable to the modern taste.” The novelist must never be asked to “begin with an examination of statistics rather than with an examination of conscience.” The novelist, and perhaps the teacher, “uses his eyes” in another way, in which “judgment is implicit in the act of seeing. His vision cannot be detached from his moral sense.” No tidy literature, and no over-planned, programmatic lessons. The novelist and teacher are both charged with making messes suffused with grace.
2.
In “Flannery O’Connor’s Writing: A Guide for the Perplexed,” (pdf) Michael M. Jordan explains that O’Connor should remain on syllabi because of her “hard yet radiant wit,” her original and powerful representation of a Christian artistic vision, and for her storytelling method, which “uses violence, exaggeration, distortion to shock us into a serious consideration of religious dogmas and mysteries.” To the uninitiated reader or student, these dynamic elements often cause confusion.
As a Catholic, I find O’Connor less perplexing than illuminating. This is not to say that Catholics own her writing. A very lapsed Catholic, Joyce Carol Oates, says it well: “To readers and critics to whom life is not at all mysterious, but simply a matter of processes, her writing will seem unnaturally rigorous, restrained, even compulsive. It is certainly ‘neurotic.’ However, if one believes that life is essentially mysterious, then literature is a celebration of that mystery, a pushing toward the ‘limits of mystery.’”
Jordan reminds us that O’Connor believed “fiction is art, not primarily moral instruction, not a type of catechism.” That refusal to be clean and tidy in her fiction has unsettled readers and critics on all sides. O’Connor explained that her “violent literary means” were necessary to communicate to the world of her fiction to a secular audience, a readership often “hostile” to religious fiction.
Because her religion so profoundly formed her cultural and artistic senses, O’Connor is difficult for most students. In fact, many of the essential writers my students find the most difficult are Catholics: Thomas Pynchon, Ernest Hemingway, Cormac McCarthy, Don DeLillo, James Joyce, and Toni Morrison. This is not to claim that their Catholicism makes them innately worthy of study -- a claim that would be laughed away by O’Connor -- rather, that their works speak to the diversity and complexity of sacramental visions of the world. In an educational sense, the extent of their religious practice is less important than the appropriation of Catholic iconography, symbolism, narrative tradition, and even the ritual language of Mass. Whether respectful or parodic of the Word, they all have been formed by it. O’Connor was the most publicly Catholic of the bunch, and, notwithstanding Pynchon’s eccentricities, the strangest on the page. Which, I think, makes her worth teaching.
3.
Writer Constance Hale first encountered Flannery O’Connor’s work at Princeton in the late 1970s. Princeton started admitting women in 1969, but the campus was “still a male bastion,” where men greatly outnumbered women on syllabi. An English major who wanted to write, Hale “was aching to read literature written by women, and I was desperate to find teachers who could help me formulate some of the ideas that preoccupied me (like, Who are the muses of female poets? Or, Why do I love Virginia Woolf so much? Or, If women's literature is invisible in the academy, where does that put me as a young writer?)” Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop were given cursory coverage, but writers like Gertrude Stein, Adrienne Rich, and Muriel Rukeyser were absent. Hale asked her professor why. His answer: “We teach the canon.”
Hale and other students “scoured the syllabi of every English course taught,” discovering that other than courses in the 19th century novel, women were largely absent. The department chair was sympathetic to their concerns. By the end of that semester, a course titled “The Southern Short Story” was created, including fiction by Flannery O’Connor and Eudora Welty.
Now O’Connor is a mainstay of college courses, but still requires context and explanation. Fr. Mark Bosco, S.J., a professor of English and Theology at Loyola University, Chicago, stresses her status as a Southern writer, as a woman in a male-dominated publishing world, and her “identity as a devout Catholic whose faith informed everything she did and ordered all her understanding of the power of art.” At the start of a course, his students know “very little” about O’Connor, “except that I am fanatical about her work.” Fr. Bosco teaches her stories in series of four, beginning with "A Good Man is Hard to Find” or “The Life You Save May Be Your Own,” and sometimes “The River,” but says little “to allow students to register their own reactions to O'Connor's works.” Only after the second story does he discuss “her Catholic imagination, of the way sacramentality is a kind of aesthetic strategy in her work, and how this strategy is so akin to art and metaphor.” He ends with the existential and religious discourses of “Parker’s Back” (pdf) and “Revelation” (pdf). This is when his classes finally “get” O’Connor. As one student told him, “not knowing the religious aspects of her stories is like not knowing that there is cake under the icing.”
One refrain I heard when speaking with those who teach O’Connor is the need to acknowledge her complexity. Writer Paul Lisicky, who teaches in the Rutgers-Camden MFA program, says “it's so easy to simplify O'Connor. Even sophisticated readers are prone to missing out on all the nuances in the work. First timers tend to read the stories as satire. Yes O'Connor is poking fun, but she also believes in her characters' capacity to change--that's what distinguishes her from a satirist. In the classroom I spend a lot of time talking about all the complexities inside those moments of grace. Those moments (not ‘Why you're one of God's babies’ but ‘Why you're one of my babies’) always manage to demolish a simple interpretation, and that's what's astonishing about them. You can't tame the stories, they refuse to sit still, refuse good manners, and you're not paying full attention if you're not destroyed a little by them. Well, destroyed and vitalized.”
4.
Destroyed and vitalized is the best phrase I’ve heard to explain the redemptive power of O’Connor’s fiction. I mean redemptive in the Catholic sense, but more widely so in the narrative sense. The sheer originality of her stories shows students how amplifying their surrounding world can make great fiction. Now, 50 years after her death, when she is a staple of syllabi and the very canon that previously excluded her and other women, it is most important to stress fresh approaches to her work within the classroom.
This, of course, begins in the way we write about O’Connor. Two recent works of note are Carlene Bauer's epistolary novel, Frances and Bernard, a fictionalization of the correspondence and friendship of O'Connor and the poet Robert Lowell, and RT Smith’s The Red Wolf, a book of poems that effectively channel O’Connor’s persona. Paul Elie's The Life You Save May Be Your Own, a consideration of O'Connor along with Walker Percy, Thomas Merton, and Dorothy Day, remains an essential reference. One of the most original examinations of her work and influence is A Good War is Hard to Find: The Art of Violence in America, a sequence of essays by David Griffith. Griffith examines American conceptions of violence in the art and thought of Andy Warhol and Susan Sontag, in films like Pulp Fiction, Blue Velvet, and The Exorcist, and in everyday life (one essay is titled “Regarding the Electric Chair My Wife’s College Boyfriend Built in His House”). Griffith’s locus is the Abu Ghraib prison photographs. He thinks O’Connor would have found them “grotesque,” but in her own definition, that the grotesque “makes visible hidden ‘discrepancies’ between character and belief.” Abu Ghraib unwound American innocence through shock, in the same metaphorical way her fiction disrupts and disturbs us. Similarly, American public reaction to the photographs — the tendency to identify the perpetrators as in no way representative of “us” — is reflective of O’Connor’s “judgment of what she saw as the modern attitude toward ‘redemption’: Everyone wants it, but no one stops to consider its real cost.”
Griffith now directs the creative writing program at the Interlochen Center for the Arts, but first taught O’Connor to gifted high school students in Pennsylvania. They were “savvy readers,” “precocious storytellers,” and “astute observers of literary conventions,” but they “struggled” with meaning; they “wanted to leap straight for it and pin it down, like it was the jugular and then sit back satisfied once they felt they had punctured it.” Biographical and cultural context was essential. Students needed to know “how lupus required her to live with her mother on their small Georgia farm; how being a well-read, well-catechized Catholic in central Georgia might cause you to regard Protestants; and how her faith lead her to understand the work of writing.” Those biographical mini-lectures, as well as excerpts from workslike “The Catholic Novelist in the Protestant South” (pdf) and “Some Aspects of the Grotesque in Southern Fiction” helped students understand that O’Connor “felt that what happens to the Grandmother in ‘A Good Man is Hard to Find’ was a moment of Grace.” Students soon “fell in love with Flannery” more than the work of other writers. Her fiction revealed that the best artists held “a sense of urgency, a sense that what they are doing is the working-out of larger, personal concerns and obsessions.” Although the vast majority of his students did not share O’Connor’s religion, her Catholic worldview--an “Augustinian view that all is sacred except sin, or the Kierkegaardian view that even the man knocking at the door of the brothel is looking for God”--so fully informs her work that students benefit from observing a writer suffused with a passion, “that there is a definite philosophy and worldview there underneath all these wooden-legged philosophers, and one-armed hoboes, and Polish refugee farmhands.” Griffith teaches O’Connor “because I love her work and think it is important, but also because it helps young writers who might feel they have strong convictions about the world see that the next step is seeing what happens when you test them in the crucible of fiction.”
Bryan Giemza, author of Irish Catholic Writers and the Invention of the American South, teaches O’Connor’s fiction at Randolph-Macon College in Ashland, Virginia. He admits that her stories “are getting harder to teach” as students become less biblically-literate; “when Manly Pointer makes off with Hulga/Joy's leg in ‘Good Country People,’ (pdf) they don't necessarily see it as an illustration of the importance of losing the limb that bars entry to the kingdom of God.” Giemza explains that O’Connor’s “droll humor” often happens when “scripture is misquoted, misappropriated, or misunderstood to suit the purposes of a character.” In that way, students are similar to O’Connor’s contemporary readers, so the hard work of teaching “is helping them to see how often they are tricked into thinking a character is repellent--only to see their own face reflected there. And to demonstrate that grace by its nature is hard, and that hope is by nature a test of faith.”
He recommends her recently released Prayer Journal and “A Good Man is Hard to Find” as good starting points for students. Her journal allows him to “point out the various prayer traditions she canvasses and how she shared in the aspirations and worries of someone their age, albeit someone with an incredible depth of field, spiritually speaking. She commands respect that way.” I like Giemza’s method in teaching her popular story. He tells students “things tend towards their ends, that we are creatures of habit, and that virtue has to be practiced. I give them a series of statements to respond to, like ‘I'm basically a good person.’ A majority of my students agree with that position, and aren't aware that it flies in the face of orthodoxy, and certainly goes against Flannery O'Connor's belief. They're usually stunned to learn that no less an authority than Christ said that no man is good. And those who condemn the grandmother have to be shown their own warts, just like those who despise the mother in ‘Everything That Rises Must Converge,’ (pdf) with her patronizing coin, need to be reminded of the story of the widow's mite.”
O’Connor is one of the best at peeling back our public covers and showing those warts. Like so many writers chided for their disturbing content, criticisms of her work are often less about the texts themselves, and more about our refusals as readers, students, and teachers to examine our own lives. Perhaps even more than her odd characters, it is the “stark racism” of O’Connor’s world that pushes away some of Giemza’s students. But Giemza doesn’t want them to blink; “the danger . . . is that students who (think they) live in a post-racial age must still contend with the sins of the fathers, and I am surprised by how many can blithely accept that those sins have been expiated. Perhaps they don't see its urgency, but here in the region that helped the nation understand its first fall (i.e. the legacies of our foundation in slavery), we have a duty to try to come to grips with it. It remains the essence of the fallen-ness in her work, and its insistence that God is no respecter of persons or the hierarchies of the temporal order, which can be inverted at a stroke.”
Flannery O’Connor makes an appearance in White Girls, a collection of fact and fiction by Hilton Als. In “The Lonesome Place,” Als explains that O’Connor’s “black characters are not symbols defined in opposition to whiteness; they are the living people who were, physically at least, on the periphery of O’Connor’s own world.” She portrayed her black characters in a more authentic way than William Faulkner; she “didn’t use them as vessels of sympathy or scorn; she simply--and complexly--drew from life.” And O’Connor’s racists were realer, more evil than Faulkner’s bigots: they were the nice ladies who patronized black children on the bus, or the old woman “who loves to regale her grandchildren with stories about the ‘pickaninnies’ of her antebellum youth.” Those women “wouldn’t know grace if it slapped them in the face--which it often does.”
5.
Like many, I introduce O’Connor with “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” but I think “Parker’s Back” delivers the best intellectual slap. The story’s theological pivot--a misunderstanding of a character’s tattoo of Christ as an act of idolatry rather than iconography--can be explained to students once the story is experienced on a dramatic level.
The story shows how O’Connor’s understanding of bodies was formed by her Catholicism, and through her own suffering from lupus. She refined “Parker’s Back” while home at Andalusia twenty pounds lighter after four blood transfusions, and finished the story within a month of her death in August, 1964. Biographer Brad Gooch notes that O’Connor “devoted every inch of her consciousness” to “Parker’s Back” and another story, “Judgment Day,” and that dedication shows. Parker’s body, identity, and soul transform within the story. He never has a sense of “wonder in himself” until he sees a performer tattooed head to foot. A lapsed Methodist, Parker undergoes a spiritual awakening when he watches the performer “[flex] his muscles so that the arabesque of men and beasts and flowers on his skin appeared to have a subtle motion of its own.” The sight of this man is the first clue for Parker “that there was anything out of the ordinary about the fact that he existed.”
Parker soon gets a tattoo, and the process is Catholic in sentiment: “It hurt very little, just enough to make it appear to Parker to be worth doing.” Those tattoos are the first thing that simultaneously attracts and repels his future wife, Sarah Ruth. She is a fundamentalist caricature who “insisted that the pictures on the skin were vanity of vanities” and “thought churches were idolatrous.” In order to keep her around, though, Parker decides to get a religious tattoo on his back.
This is where I pause the story. If the students have been paying close attention, they should recognize this is a fool’s errand. Sarah Ruth rejects her husband’s tattoos not because of their subjects, but their defacement of his body. Parker misunderstands this. His conversation with the tattoo artist encapsulates the entire story:
The artist went over to a cabinet at the back of the room and began to look over some art books. “Who are you interested in?” he said, “saints, angels, Christs or what?”
“God,” Parker said.
“Father, Son or Spirit?”
“Just God,” Parker said impatiently. “Christ. I don’t care. Just so it’s God.”
Parker is the classic O’Connor character, a man who cannot “see” or understand those who surround him, whose blindness hides God. His large tattoo requires two days of work, and so he spends the night at a Christian mission, where the “only light was from a phosphorescent cross glowing at the end of the room.” He can only see the “little red and blue and ivory and saffron squares” of the work in progress, not the Christ to come.
When Parker returns home, Christ on his back, sensitive readers know the reunion will not end well. O’Connor is not a writer of mundane surprises. She is a writer of transformations. Sarah Ruth refuses to open the door for her husband, saying “It ain’t nobody I know,” which symbolically could refer to Parker or to the tattooed image of Christ on his back. She screams: “God? God don’t look like that!” Parker asks how Sarah Ruth would know the look of God, and she responds “he don’t look . . . He’s a spirit. No man shall see his face.” She beats Parker with a broom until “large welts had formed on the face of the tattooed Christ.”
The final paragraph is pure O’Connor: “She stamped the broom two or three times on the floor and went to the window and shook it out to get the taint of him off it. Still gripping it, she looked toward the pecan tree and her eyes hardened still more. There he was--who called himself Obadiah Elihue--leaning against the tree, crying like a baby.”
Flannery O’Connor reminds us that the best way to read a story is to encounter the work on its own merits. A student, O’Connor writes, needs to have the tools of understanding “proper to the structure of the work, tools proper to the craft. They are tools that operate inside the work and not outside it; they are concerned with how this story is made and with what makes it work as a story.” O’Connor’s interior idea of art helps literature students experience words and not merely project theories. Her fiction helps young writers craft stories and not sermons, religious or otherwise. She warns “for the reading of literature ever to become a habit and a pleasure, it must first be a discipline.” We might think her intonations stern, but we are lucky to have her as a teacher.
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