At Gunpoint

THE COMPLETE STORIES by Flannery O'Connor. 555 pages. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. $10.

Graham Greene once said that in any good writer a moment of crystallization occurs "when the dominant theme is plainly expressed, when the private universe becomes visible even to the least sensitive reader." In the work of Flannery O'Connor, who died in 1964 at age 39, that moment comes in one of her best-known stories, A Good Man Is Hard to Find. A maniac escaped from prison has just slaughtered a family despite the pitifully agile efforts of the grandmother to cajole or convert him. "She would of been a good woman," the convict mumbles, "if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life."

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.

In O'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 speculations grow deadlier, she recalls a newsreel showing bodies stacked in a concentration camp, then thinks of --"ten billion of them pushing their way into new places over here."

On those occasions when the author is laughing at the South, she is casual, succinct and totally unpicturesque. An earnest revival preacher loses his audience after a child asks to have his mother cured of a hangover. There are ugly girls with names like Glynese or Carramae and crones like Mrs. Freeman of Good Country People, who "beside the neutral expression that she wore when she was alone had two others, forward and reverse."

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.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.