Flannery
Brad Gooch
Little, Brown and Co.
From Publishers Weekly  Gooch (*City Poet:**The Life and Times of Frank O'Hara*) offers a surprisingly bloodless biography of Flannery O'Connor (1925–1964), who, despite the author's diligent scholarship, remains enigmatic. She emerges only in her excerpted letters, speeches and fiction, where she is as sharp-tongued, censorious, piteously observant and mordantly funny as her beloved short stories. There is little genuinely interesting new material, but there are small gems—the full story of O'Connor's friendship with the mysterious A. of her letters, for instance. Perhaps mindful of the writer's dislike of being exposed in print, Gooch errs on the side of delicacy; he does not sufficiently explore her attitudes toward blacks and how the early onset of lupus left her sequestered on her mother's Georgia farm, without the male companionship she craved. Instead, he plumbs O'Connor's fiction for buried fragments of her daily life, and the revelations are hardly astonishing. Readers looking for more startling tidbits will be disappointed by this account that brims with the quiet satisfactions the author took in her industry (I sit all day typing and grinning like the Cheshire cat), her faith, friends and stoic approach to a debilitating disease. 16 pages of b&w photos. *(Feb. 25)*    Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.    From The New Yorker  Drawing on recently unsealed letters and an impressive array of interviews, Gooch provides the first major biography of Flannery O'Connor since she died in 1964, at the age of thirty-nine. He presents a writer influenced by the early death of her father and the retreat from city life to country; an Irish Catholic upbringing that evolved into an adult fascination with theology; and a Southern small-town culture whose matrons, including O'Connor's mother, were happy for her success but put off by the unladylike nature of her work''Everybody here shakes my hand but nobody reads my stories.' Though she spent time in both the Midwest and the Northeast, lupus narrowed the circle of her life to a dairy farm in Milledgeville, Georgia, where she collected exotic birds. Gooch's account is meticulous, but O'Connor's sedate, chaste life is pale in comparison with her fantastic fiction'a contrast that underscores her inscrutable genius.    Copyright ©2008* Click here to subscribe to The New Yorker*