Such Nice People

A GOOD MAN is HARD TO FIND, AND OTHER STORIES (251 pp.)--Flannery O'Connor--Harcourt, Brace ($3.50).

These ten witheringly sarcastic stories come from another talented Southern lady whose work is highly unladylike. Still in her late twenties, and the product of a college writing class (State University of Iowa), Georgia's Flannery O'Connor has already learned to strip the acres of clay-country individuality with the merciless efficiency of a cotton-picking machine. She can also slash through the window boxes and buckthorn hedges and expose the peckernecks who have moved to town and put on pretensions. Her instruments are a brutal irony, a slam-bang humor and a style of writing as balefully direct as a death sentence. The South that simpers, storms and snivels in these pages moves along a sort of up-to-date Tobacco Road, paved right into town.

Nobody is noble in these stories. These are the "maimed souls" and the ferociously maternal types whose footless magnanimity seems unfailingly to destroy those around them. In the title story, the fatal female is the grandmother who chatters, "People are certainly not nice like they used to be," and nags her son's vacationing family into driving off on a side road. Instead of finding the six-columned mansion she insists she remembers, they run into three escaped convicts who rob and shoot the lot, the babbling old feather-wit last of all. Good Country People looses Mrs.Hopewell, who "had no bad qualities of her own but . . . was able to use other people's in such a constructive way that she never felt the lack." When she invites a young, Bible-peddling wool-hat to supper, he winds up taking her crippled daughter to a hayloft, fortifies himself with whisky (which he carries in a hollowed-out Bible), and steals the girl's wooden leg.

Only in her longest story, The Displaced Person, does Ferocious Flannery weaken her wallop by groping about for a symbolic second-story meaning -- in this case, something about salvation. But despite such arty fumbling, which also marred Author O'Connor's novel Wise Blood (TIME, June 9, 1952), this is still a power ful and moving tale of an innocent Pole who stumbles against the South's color bar. Whatever her uncertainties in the longer form, Flannery O'Connor packs a punch in her short stories that for sheer sardonic brutality occasionally recalls the early Graham Greene.

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