Wise Blood
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Average rating3.5
Wise Blood, Flannery O'Connor's astonishing and haunting first novel, is a classic of twentieth-century literature. It is the story of Hazel Motes, a twenty-two-year-old caught in an unending struggle against his inborn, desperate fate. He falls under the spell of a "blind" street preacher named Asa Hawks and his degenerate fifteen-year-old daughter, Sabbath Lily. In an ironic, malicious gesture of his own non-faith, and to prove himself a greater cynic than Hawks, Motes founds the Church Without Christ, but is still thwarted in his efforts to lose God. He meets Enoch Emery, a young man with "wise blood," who leads him to a mummified holy child and whose crazy maneuvers are a manifestation of Motes's existential struggles. This tale of redemption, retribution, false prophets, blindness, blindings, and wisdom gives us one of the most riveting characters in American fiction.
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Flannery O'Connor is a better short fiction writer than novelist. Of her two novels, “The Violent Bear It Away” is better.
“Wise Blood” is an interesting Southern Gothic novel about Hazel, a young World War II veteran who, probably because of his experiences in the war, has become a militant atheist. Everyone he meets he assumes is a Christian and feels a need to convert to a life without Jesus. He even becomes a preacher of sorts for what he calls the “Church Without Christ.” His own belief system is muddled and tenets he believes at one point he questions at another.
Along the way, he meets a number of interesting characters, such as a supposedly blind street preacher and his daughter, a prostitute who always leaves him feeling worse after their time together, and a manic zookeeper.
Hazel becomes obsessed with Jesus more so than most Christians and that leads him to an unexpected character arc.
The novel's main problem is that because all of the characters are so grotesque and exaggerated, it's hard to sympathize with any of them. The other problem is that there is minimal plot and characters develop rather slowly with a lot of repetition.
It's an interesting and thought-provoking story, but a highly flawed one.
A tormenting novel, a moral apocalypse. Simply arresting, and its hard to say why, O'Connor's hell is different from any I've seen before... Perhaps because while other hells in literature have a defined Satan there is none in Wise Blood, simply the illiterate and hateful clawing at each other. Such cruelty and evil, and yet Jesus' name is not missing from a single chapter, the destruction of morality would not be complete without the knowledge that somewhere someone is grieving it, and that shadow hangs heavy over this book.
