Book Review: Wise Blood

I hadn’t heard of O’Connors Wise Blood until it mysteriously materialized in my to-read list. This might not be remarkable except for the fact that the mid-century book is highly rated both critically and general readership-wise. Maybe my cultural connection to the literary world and its history is still in question.

The story follows Hazel Motes as he leaves the armed forces after Korea and return home to the town of Taulkinham, finding his family gone. He then becomes mostly transient and is befriended by the yappy Enoch Emery, a gate guard at the local zoo. Motes also chases down — literally, at times — a blind street preacher and his assistant daughter, and Motes level of irritation with their profession is high enough that it causes him to start his own religion: the Church Without Christ. He eventually comes to compete with another preacher with a similar theology. Throw in there an unattractive hooker, a dilapidated car that somehow works, a gorilla suit, and a mummified corpse, and it all eventually works itself out in the end.

Wise Blood is exemplary of when an author enters into a full blown “I’m going to depress my readers” mode, when the story is taken prima facie, because every major character suffers from a kind of social disgrace. Motives are without real foundation, regard for personal well-being is ignored, and everyone is paranoid, grumpy, and bad to look at and think about. Personally some of the discomfort of experiencing this kind of society is mitigated when the allegorical template is screened over everything, but there’s still a bad taste in my mouth from it. Everyone wanders around aimlessly only to jump into action the moment O’Connor needs them in order to fulfill their part in her narrative iconography (the whole incident with the cop pulling Motes over for speeding is especially baffling). O’Connor undoubtedly intended for the reader to experience some repulsion at the social disorder she created in Taulkinham. She keeps the glue of civilization just tacky enough for her to get her story through — the level of chaos present would make a functional social order unsustainable.

One is left to take the O’Connor’s Taulkinham as a “soft” allegory — a term which I completely made up, antonymous to a “hard” allegory like The Pilgrim’s Progress. Critics have called Wise Blood a novel in the Southern gothic tradition, and representative of the the growing hegemony of post-War Christianity in the south. While this is fairly accurate and it might make for good social commentary but not for a universally great, standalone read.