‘Flannery: A Life Of Flannery O’Connor’

Brad Gooch’s Flannery: A Life of Flannery O’Connor  fulfills at least one of the goals of modern literary biography, giving a detailed, convincing account of the subject’s life. His chronicle of O’Connor’s days is vivid and well-organized, showing her home and family in central Georgia as the magnet to which she was an astonishing satellite.  The second goal of the biographer (and any reader can set as many as he or she chooses) might be a plausible interpretation of the writers’s work as a reflection, however dim, of the writer’s life, making a discussion of the two a useful project.  Here Mr. Gooch succeeds also, but with not quite the sureness he does in the first objective, the simple telling of her story.