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From the beginning, I knew Ann Napolitano's A Good Hard Look was going to be a love it or hate it book for me. Set in Flannery O’Connor’s hometown of Milledgeville, Georgia, the novel explores the lives of both the town’s populace and its most infamous resident. From the night that the deafening sound of Flannery’s screaming peacocks fills the air before beautiful Cookie Himmel is set to marry the wealthy, former-Manhattanite Melvin Whiteson, it is clear that the lives of everyone in town will never be the same.
Being raised in Alabama, I, like most of my fellow Southerners, have an incredible reverence for all Southern writers. From William Faulkner and Eudora Welty to Pat Conroy and Willie Morris, I love Southern literature. I was even named for the main character from Eudora Welty’s The Optimist’s Daughter, and I'm not sure you can get more Southern than that. When you take on Flannery, you better do it well.
And Ann Napolitano does it well. Her writing style is nothing short of graceful, and her use of metaphor is not only illustrative but melodic.
Each character is carefully crafted and seems to share just enough of themselves with the reader while also holding back in a way that seems perfectly appropriate to mirror what we do and don’t share, the choices we make and the choices we wish we’d made, the guilt, secrets and bonds we explore and sometimes let be.
I could not put the book down and finished it in 24 hours. It was also one of those books that I didn’t want to end because I didn’t want to leave the world Napolitano had created.
Flannery O'Connor comes alive for the audience, as do all the other residents of Milledgeville. As a reader, it was also Flannery that most fascinated me as a character. This is a woman dying of an autoimmune disease who decides that all that matters will be her work, so she devotes herself to writing as her sole purpose in what she knows will be a short life. However, as her friendship with Melvin Whiteson grows, you also watch as she is forced to confront some of what she gave up in this single-minded pursuit and the life she might have had if things had been different.
As a writer, Napolitano’s depiction of Flannery was particularly tragic to me because it raised questions with which I often struggle. Can the beholden writer ever be great? The honesty that gives Flannery’s work its power is also the very trait that makes many people in town fear or dislike her. When one is bound by close relationships, family or even just a sense of not wanting to hurt others' feelings, can that same person write with the greatness of one who doesn’t struggle with those ties? How much can anyone put on the page and still maintain the intimacy and trust of their actual lives? Is one sacrifice worth the other?
This is also what I think Napolitano does best in A Good Hard Look -- capture the small and great tragedies in all of her characters' lives. Whether it’s the town’s seamstress, beauty or world-renowned author, she finds the sadness in what could be considered the mundane aspects of their daily lives as well as the truly horrific moments that come to define them. In so doing, she has written a novel that I think will resonate with many readers and be hard to forget long after turning the final page.
