Wise Blood by Flannery O'Connor

 

I read this book this morning in a coffee shop, after checking it out from the library because there are about fifty samples from the movie of it in Ministry's song "Jesus Built My Hotrod." Turns out the novel is just about as nihilistic as those samples/quotations make it sound. *Where you come from is gone, where you thought you were were going to was never there, and were you are is no good unless you can get away from it.*This is actually a reasonably pleasant read, on the prose level, but it's impossible to get past the feeling that O'Connor doesn't like the characters and she can't stop laughing at them in a mean-spirited way. Laden with immediate post-WW2 Southern poverty and filth and casual racism, jam-packed with deeply unpleasant people that read like caricatures described with un/loving precision. The edition I read was apparently still using the prints of the tenth-anniversary edition, which had a little foreword from O'Connor in which she says something to the effect that she thinks non-Christians see the main character's integrity as being about his persistence in trying to get out from his religion, while she sees his integrity as being about not being able to; I think both of these things are correct, and I think both these things are wrong.