REVIEW: Wise Blood (Flannery O'Connor)

Please note: this review has been plucked directly from my Goodreads account.  There are some slight differences in formatting, but essentially everything else is going to be the same.  Since I can't do a "Spoiler" tag in the HTML here (which would have been AWESOME), I'm going to just tell you right off the bat that there are spoilers in this post.  I spoil the ending of Wise Blood, so if you don't want to know how it ends (and it's a shocker!) then please don't read any further.

Thanks!

-Emmy

*****

Wow...Um, okay....So, I have a lot of thoughts about this book.

For the first bit, I really didn't like it.  I must have read the first three to five pages again and again and again, because I just couldn't get into it.  But then, I started listening to it on audio.  The narrator, Bronson Pinchot, is not my favorite.  (I tried listening to his reading of The Alchemaster's Apprentice and it just sounded all wrong to my ears).  He was much better in this book--I really liked the voices he gave to Hazel, Encoh, and Onnie Jay Holy--but there were still a handful of times when I thought that he missed the author's intentions, or that the characterization was off.  For example, for some reason, even when she was supposed to be yelling and screaming, Sabbath's voice never seemed to rise above a whisper.

But, enough about the audio.  In terms of the book itself...well, I still have issues.  I'll admit, I was incredibly invested.  I found Hazel Motes to be a fascinating character.  And even though Enoch had his fair share of issues, I found that I really liked him, too.  Perhaps that's why the ending bothered me so much.

As I'm given to understand, Enoch's story ends with him stealing a gorilla suit and running off to his new life...as an ape?  Does he intend to travel around pretending to be Gonga?  Does he just want to live freely?  Will being a hand-shaking ape allow him to make more friends?  Is this his way of making the human connections that he was lacking?  I don't entirely understand.

But, it wasn't Enoch's end that bothered me.  It was Haze's.  First, there was that shockingly brutal scene where he murders the True Prophet.  I know he was scared that Shoats was replacing him, and that seeing his double freaked him out, but he straight up murders the man by driving over him a couple of times with his car!  The scene was so simple, so matter of fact that you have to remind yourself that something horrible has just happened.  That it's meant to shock, to horrify.

And then there's Hazel's fate.  When he takes the bucket of lime up to his room, I thought that he was going to chicken out like Hawkes did.  And when he doesn't, I just couldn't believe it.  But, it got worse.  He's got rocks and glass in his shoes, barbed wire wrapped around his waist, and he's literally dying in a ditch after his landlady tries to blackmail him into marrying her...and he's beaten to death by a cop!

I read those last few pages and then just sat there.  Just processing what I had read.  What was the point of all that?

I've been thinking about it for a couple of hours now, and I think I understand the meaning of the ending.  At least a little.  Haze spends the entire book trying to preach his "Church Without Christ", without success.  At the heart of it all, Hazel believes far more than he would like to admit.  And his vehement denial of Christ actually breaks him in the end.   The human heart is made to love and know God.  And O'Connor's deeply Catholic message here is that the denial of God, which is in turn a denial of the most deep and abiding human part of us, is ultimately self-destructive.  The rocks and barbed wire and punishments; Hazel is trying to repent for something he can't even bring himself to acknowledge as a sin.  But, in the end, it's too much for him and he dies under the wight of his own denial.

The more I think about this book, the more conflicted I get.  And perhaps that's the point.  Perhaps we're supposed to think about this story long after we finish.  And I know I have a lot to think about.  Hazel Motes will be lingering in my mind for a long time to come.