Bookends

FLANNERY O'CONNOR: COLLECTED WORKS

edited by Sally Fitzgerald

Library of America; 1,281 pages; $30

"I believe that there are many rough beasts now slouching toward Bethlehem to be born and that I have reported the progress of a few of them." Flannery O'Connor's modest self-analysis remains the most penetrating of all. Doomed by | a hereditary disease, lonely, indomitable, sustained by her faith and her work, the Southern Catholic saw herself as a lifelong outsider. When she died at 39 in 1964, she left a legacy of gothic tales obsessively concerned with characters she called "more or less primitive." The author displayed no biases. Blacks are sometimes sympathetic; just as often they bring trouble. The moral force of religion can be redemptive, or it can lead to violence and death. Women may prove enlightened, or they may be evil incarnate. Only one thing is certain: no good deed is ever forgiven, and that insight informs O'Connor's fictions with a perverse brilliance.

This collection, scrupulously annotated by her friend Sally Fitzgerald, includes the two novels, all 28 short stories, essays and more than 250 indiscreet and entertaining letters. In them a previously hidden critic emerges: "Mr. Truman Capote makes me plumb sick, as does Mr. Tenn. Williams . . . if ((James)) Baldwin were white nobody would stand him a minute." She has nothing but awe for William Faulkner, the only other Southern novelist to be published in the magisterial Library of America series. She belongs in his company.

THE SILENCE IN THE GARDEN

by William Trevor

Viking; 204 pages; $17.95

For decades, writers have followed James Joyce's characterization of Ireland as "the old sow that eats her farrow." But that is not the way of William Trevor. His novel takes place on Carriglas, a tiny island off the Irish coast, where a Protestant family's present griefs are rooted in the events of long ago. Sarah Pollexfen's cousins once cruelly terrorized the son of a tenant farmer; as a man he sought revenge with a bomb that accidentally killed the family butler. The servant's illegitimate child, product of a liaison with a Catholic maid, survives him. When the guilt-haunted cousins die without issue, the boy inherits their estate. Throughout his distinguished career, Trevor, 60, has made the symbolic tale his specialty, and now, with a small cast and piercing ironies, the Anglo-Irishman illuminates an entire people afflicted by history. "No matter how it was," Sarah tells an old woman, "it belongs to the past now." Her listener disagrees: "The past has no belongings. The past does not obligingly absorb what is not wanted." There, encapsulated, is the story of Ireland -- and the art of one of its most skilled and subtle tragedians.

THE MAN WHO KNEW CARY GRANT by Jonathan Schwartz -

Random House; 249 pages; $16.95

The novel form can demand more shape and plot than life regularly supplies. Yet a writer's subject -- in this case the love of a father and son -- may still require a longish work of fiction. What to do? The solution here is a sheaf of related stories that swarm at random, like memories. Norman Savitt was a successful writer of show tunes in his day, which is past. His son Jesse figures variously in these well-drawn sketches as a middle-aged free-lance writer, as a child, as a teenager. Norman worries about Jesse's drinking, about his indifferent success; Jesse worries about his father's pride, about the insults of age. The women who appear are important but not central. Norman's and Jesse's occasional anguish is unspoken; what is heard is the deep, mutual fondness of two decent men. The reader notes that the author, a Manhattan deejay-singer-writer, is the son of the late composer Arthur Schwartz (Dancing in the Dark, That's Entertainment).

SHINING THROUGH

by Susan Isaacs

Harper & Row; 402 pages; $18.95

The time: World War II. The place: Manhattan, Washington and Enemy Territory. The plot, as described in the book itself: "Passion! Betrayal! War! Death! Love!" Linda Voss, an old maid at 31, has a crush on her boss, John Berringer, a Wall Street Adonis, an attorney for eternity, who wore "white shirts so starched they could carry on a life of their own." But could he ever love Linda, a secretary, "less than a person but more than a typewriter"? You bet he could. In Susan Isaacs' novels (Compromising Positions, Almost Paradise), secretaries, housewives, the faceless masses of womanhood, all run into phone booths, change clothes and come out like Cleopatra with the rectitude of Eleanor Roosevelt and no asp. Nothing is impossible. Whatever Isaacs loses where reality is concerned, she makes up with a funny, original heroine and a "Get out there, kid! You can do it!" pep talk to all women. Her tale serves as a reminder that there are a few things the Gipper just wasn't built to tackle.