Much as I love O'Connor, I always felt like the short stories that Wise Blood was made up of were so loose and dissociative that they fall through my fingers, and reading their modified forms strung together doesn't really change that. Her portrayal of the south is as compellingly rancid and distant as ever. Everyone talks past each other, rambling in ways that only have meaning to themselves. They're all dirty, hell-bound, and know it. This is of course O'Connor's strength, but I have a harder time connecting with her earlier work which feels so directionless in comparison to the much more pointed The Violent Bear It Away.

Ultimately I think faith in any real sense is too foreign to me for any of this to really strike a chord.