A Hard Book Can Be Good To Find

"The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it".

Those wise words of Flannery O'Connor are the fitting epigraph to "A Good Hard Look" (2011) by Ann Napolitano. Fitting because O'Connor herself is a central figure in this novel of power and beauty.

What was the last work of fiction you enjoyed a great deal that featured an actual person? Mine goes back 40 years - Gore Vidal's "Burr" (1973). Napolitano got me so involved in O'Connor's inner life as a writer and actual life in small town Georgia that her early death as the novel ends jarred me like a good O'Connor short story (are there any bad O'Connor short stories?). But this being a book with O'Connor as both subject and muse, a warning is in order: There is no shortage of sadness here; sometimes this can be a hard book to read. But there is also, as in O'Connor's bleakest work, redemption. And, there are plenty of luminous insights like this:

"He figured everyone had, at best, only one big story in his or her life; a story that rendered everything else a footnote".

That gem goes with Melvin Whiteson, the main fictional character, a man who ends up being O'Connor's friend in her final years. This book is full of wonderful sentences like that - it's a good find.