Word: connor
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...sanctuary upstairs, the show went on. At one end, three nude young people splashed happily in a kiddies' plastic wading pool. At the other end, Actor Kevin O'Connor (Tom Paine) performed the bathtub scene from Sam Shepard's play Chicago, a scene of despair and rebirth. At a sink, two housewives talked about which detergent was purest...
Flannery O'Connor's characters are often poor whites in the postwar South she knew well. The stories tend to start with limited people whose superficial fretfulness shields fathomless self-satisfaction-women who are always "giving thanks" and telling their "niggers" to do likewise. By the end, their world has been shattered by some agent of evil greater than anything their cramped spirits could even recognize...
...Connor's world, shrewdness does not count, nor do other traditional virtues such as thrift or planning ahead. The Displaced Person is a complex and appalling tragedy in which country people who think of themselves as hardy "survivors," destroy their own world rather than absorb a Polish refugee who is himself simply trying to survive. Few writers mix comedy and cruelty more offhandedly or more effectively. Witness a redneck farmhand's wife contemplating the Polish family's broken English: "They can't talk. You reckon they'll know what colors even is?" As her hostile...
Flannery O'Connor is seldom compassionate. She means it about that perpetual shot in the head. Her quarrel with people is that they cannot or will not see the wonder and terror of their existence. "Do you ever look inside and see what you are not?" shouts a crippled daughter at her bovine mother...
This collection brings together for the first time in one book all of Miss O'Connor's stories. Every one is good enough so that if it were the only example of her work to survive, it would be evident that the writer possessed high talent and a remarkably unclouded, unabstract, demanding intelligence. The best are among the best American short stories ever written...