Peculiar Crossroads

An impeccable exercise in literary history and criticism, Peculiar Crossroads renders a genuine understanding of the Catholic sensibility of Flannery O'Connor and Walker Percy and their influence among contemporary southern writers. Farrell O'Gorman explains that the radical religiosity of O'Connor and Percy's vision is precisely what made them so valuable as both southern fiction writers and social critics. Via their spiritual and philosophical concerns, O'Gorman asserts, these two unabashedly Catholic authors bequeathed to even their most unorthodox successors a postmodern South of shopping malls and interstates imbued with as much meaning as Appomattox or Yoknapatawpha. O'Gorman builds his argument with biographical, historical, literary, and theological evidence, examining the two writers work through intriguing pairings - such as O'Connor's Wise Blood with Percy's The Moviegoer, and O'Connor's A Good Man Is Hard to Find with Percy's Lancelot. He considers the influence exerted on their thought by the mid-century transatlantic Catholic Revival and by their relationships with southern modernists Caroline Gordon and Allen Tate.
Ultimately, Percy and O'Connor embraced a Christian existentialist view that led them to dissent from both the historical, tragic mode of the Southern Renascence and the absurdist apocalypticism of much postwar American fiction. They found hope and significance in a "Christian realism" of the "here and now," and such, O'Gorman neatly reveals, is their distinct legacy to a later generation of writers who search for meaning in a postmodern South where historical themes seem increasingly problematic.