Everything That Rises Must Converge

By: Flannery O’Connor

Narrated by: Bronson Pinchot, Karen White, Mark Bramhall, Lorna Raver

Length: 9 hrs and 6 mins

Publisher's summary

This collection of nine short stories by Flannery O'Connor was published posthumously in 1965. The flawed characters of each story are fully revealed in apocalyptic moments of conflict and violence that are presented with comic detachment.

The title story is a tragicomedy about social pride, racial bigotry, generational conflict, false liberalism, and filial dependence. The protagonist, Julian Chestny, is hypocritically disdainful of his mother's prejudices, but his smug selfishness is replaced with childish fear when she suffers a fatal stroke after being struck by a black woman she has insulted out of oblivious ignorance rather than malice.

Similarly, “The Comforts of Home” is about an intellectual son with an Oedipus complex. Driven by the voice of his dead father, the son accidentally kills his sentimental mother in an attempt to murder a harlot.

The other stories are “A View of the Woods”, “Parker's Back”, “The Enduring Chill”, “Greenleaf”, “The Lame Shall Enter First”, “Revelation”, and “Judgment Day”.

Flannery O'Connor was working on Everything That Rises Must Converge at the time of her death. This collection is an exquisite legacy from a genius of the American short story, in which she scrutinizes territory familiar to her readers: race, faith, and morality. The stories encompass the comic and the tragic, the beautiful and the grotesque; each carries her highly individual stamp and could have been written by no one else.

©1956 1957, 1958, 1960, 1961, 1962, 1964, 1965; renewed 1993 by the Estate of Mary Flannery O’Connor (P)2010 Blackstone Audio, Inc.

Critic reviews

“The current volume of posthumous stories is the work of a master, a writer's writer—but a reader's too—an incomparable craftsman who wrote, let it be said, some of the finest stories in our language." ( Newsweek)

“All in all they comprise the best collection of shorter fiction to have been published in America during the past twenty years.” ( Book Week)

“When I read Flannery O'Connor, I do not think of Hemingway, or Katherine Anne Porter, or Sartre, but rather of someone like Sophocles. What more can you say for a writer? I write her name with honor, for all the truth and all the craft with which she shows man's fall and his dishonor.” (Thomas Merton)

Decent Short Stories

I must be missing what everyone else sees in these stories. They are just ok for me; it's not the dark aspect of human nature that is bothering me, but rather, the characters all seem to me to be spineless whiners. Maybe its because I'm reading the entire collection of stories at once, but it seems redundant and tiresome to me. I liked four stories more than the others: Everything That Rises Must Converge, Greenleaf, The Lame Shall Enter First and Revelation. The narration was very good; I liked having four different narrators, which was a nice change of pace between stories.

A Powerful Anthology, but No Happy Endings

There are many wonderful stories in this anthology, and the different narrators all bring something different to the table and the characters. However, on a personal note, I liked some of the stories in the collection better than others (as is almost always the way with anthologies) and certain of the narrators didn't pair as well as others with their material. The stories I remember best are "A View of the Woods" and "Revelation" as their characters felt the most realized.

As you might expect for stories in the Gothic Tradition, the endings here are not happy. The most we get is a cautious sort of optimism for the future, and those stories are far from the majority. I give this collection a cautious recommendation as overall, the stories were well written and you get a very good sense of the Gothic Tradition.

Brilliant! Outstanding prose!!!! Great stories!!!!

Just as timely as when it was written if not more so. Be sure to read them all and savour them, relish each word and character

Great way to sample Flannery O’Connor

Wonderfully narrated stories with great dialogue. Each story read by different voice and lots if different tones used for different characters. Racism and racist epithets are jarring and dated (hopefully) but Flannery’s intent likely to highlight the hateful underlining of some of the polite southern society she is a part of and is observing.

Way too much reader interpretation for me!

What did you love best about Everything That Rises Must Converge?

I read this for a class.

What was your reaction to the ending? (No spoilers please!)

joy in having finished the book.

How did the narrator detract from the book?

For me, the readers included way too much arbitrary character interpretation to make this audio book useful. I was reading this book for a class on O'Connor, so I was interested in understanding what O'Connor actually wrote. The readers, in my opinion, went way overboard in "spicing up" the text by creating odd, eccentric, character voices which were not at all suggested by the text itself. Some the characters talked as if they were drugged, for example. I realize that the narrators were highly talented artists who undoubtedly enhanced the experience of many Audible listeners of this book. But for me it was a huge distraction, because I was only interested in understanding what Flannery O'Connor actually wrote, without any extrinsic, arbitrary input created independently by the narrators. As an example, I would suggest the reading of the character of Star Drake in "The comforts of home". The reader gives an extremely weird, over-the-top, drugged-sounding voice to Star, whereas nothing O'Connor wrote suggested that Star spoke unusually. In sum, I would have much preferred just a fairly "straight" reading of the words O'Connor wrote, without so much creative interpretation from the narrators.

If you could rename Everything That Rises Must Converge, what would you call it?

Add the names of the narrators as co-authors.

She's not for everybody

If you could sum up Everything That Rises Must Converge in three words, what would they be?

Know thyself; Hypocrisy

What other book might you compare Everything That Rises Must Converge to and why?

There are few books that I would compare to Flannery O'Connor because it is her purpose to ply the reader into thinking critically about oneself and about the human condition in a way that few authors do these days. You might compare her in style to Truman Capote or Hemingway.

Have you listened to any of the narrators’s other performances before? How does this one compare?

There are several narrators on this recording who are favorites of mine, in particular Mark Bramhall.

Any additional comments?

Remember that Flannery O'Connor spends alot of her work exploring tension in racial and inter-generational relationships and the trouble of hypocrisy, pride and prejudice. Her use of the term nigger is frequent, it gave my generally discerning teenagers almost anxious to have the narrative in the house because while they understood the period and the context the "n" word to them is like the "f" word for Grandma.

Stories Amazing; Readers Worthy of the Material

Any additional comments?

This was possibly the best audiobook experience I've ever had with fiction. Each of the readers did a wonderful job with voices and with the "voice" of these stories, which are among the greatest (and funniest) in the American canon. As soon as I finished, I started over at the beginning and started listening to the first stories again.

Short Stores with a Tragic Ending

Would you recommend this audiobook to a friend? If so, why?

Yes if the friend liked unhappy southern tales with a tragic twist.

What did you like best about this story?

Characterizations in each of the short stories.

Have you listened to any of the narrators’s other performances before? How does this one compare?

Very well done.

Who was the most memorable character of Everything That Rises Must Converge and why?

The historian son who is full of himself but unable to deal with sexual issues.

Any additional comments?

The various narrators really enhanced the stories.

I don't know how to really evaluate this

One of my reading projects this year has been to read all of Flannery O’Connor’s fiction this year. I have previously read A Good Man is Hard to Find, but I will probably re-read it again. But I have no idea what to think about O’Connor now that I have finished all of her fiction.

She is a skilled writer. It is easy to see that she is writing not just for a surface meaning, but for the re-readings as well. There is depth there that many writers cannot pull off.

But there is also a twistedness that is hard to take. It is not just that many of these stories end in ironic tragedy, but that there is an intentional turning everything upside down. There is much to appreciate about the upside-down nature of the stories. A woman farmer that complains about a stray bull is, of course, gored by the bull. I saw that coming a mile away. But the path to the inevitable end seems to matter. And the upside-down nature of the stories I believe is representative of her understanding of Christianity.

Part of what I do not know how to process is what much of this means. As I was reading around after finishing, one blogger called the title story one of the most anti-racist short story ever written (which does seem to be more than a little hyperbolic), while many others concentrate on her refusal to meet James Baldwin when he was in Millegeville or her antipathy to the civil rights movements or her racist jokes that were not uncommon in her letters.

It just feels much more complicated than the either/or. Alice Walker, probably best known for her novel Color Purple has a chapter on O’Connor in her collection of essays, In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens. For about a year, Alice Walker, when she was 8 and O’Connor would have been 28, lived just a few miles from O’Connor’s farm and remembers passing it, although she did not know anything about O’Connor at the time. In 1974, Walker and her mother went to visit their old home, a falling down shack in the middle of a pasture, and then the O’Connor farm.

Walker and her mother ate in a local restaurant, that was legally obligated to serve them, but did not have to like it. And they visited the O’Connor house, which had been built with slave labor and still had a servant/slave house behind it. Alice Walker had appreciated the skill of O’Connor’s writing when she first came across it in college. But when she eventually came to know about African American writers she put O’Connor away. Walker’s resentment against O’Connor was at least partially having been introduced to O’Connor without being introduced to skilled African American authors at the same time. Eventually she missed O’Connor and was able to pick her up again.

The essay is 18 pages of ambivalence that ends with, “’Take what you can use and let the rest rot.” If ever there was an expression designed to protect the health of the spirit, this is it.’ That is a phrase and sentiment that Alice Walker can use, but I do not think I can. It is not that I cannot attempt to find good in O’Connor, I can. However, as a White person, I cannot take the good and leave the bad without reckoning with the history. Historically, White culture takes the good but does not deal with the pain or broader culture and history that gave rise to what is viewed as good.

O’Connor frequently uses the N word in her writing, which mattered then and matters now. Walker and some others have noted that O’Connor does not write from the internal view of African Americans in her stories, which Walker believes was an attempt at respect for African Americans, but that does not seem to be enough. Others have suggested that O’Connor’s writing would have changed significantly had she lived longer, which is of course likely, but we do not know how it would have changed.

I have written before about my difficulty with how to deal with the weaknesses of Christians. It is not that I dispute the concept of universal sin, I do not. I also affirm that we were created as limited being as James KA Smith has written well about. However Christianity has moral and ethical beliefs and while no one seriously debates that the church has failed on those many times, how we think about the people that both do good and do evil, especially evil in the name of Christ, is not simple.

I do not think I will ever be completely at ease with sinful Christians. I do not think I want to become at ease. I also do not want to apply a level of critique of for historical (or Christians today) that is more than what I want applied to me or is beyond real capacity of Christians. While everyone is sinful in some ways, the use of Christianity to oppress others or to empower yourself over others is a particularly harmful set of sins that has to be rooted out of leadership. Racism, sexism, abusive power, sexual or other types of physical or emotional abuse should be disqualifying from Christian leadership. The implications of those sins isn’t just on the proximate victims, but on the very message of Christ.

Flannery O’Connor was a skilled writer who was also a serious Christian that strove to use her faith to inform her writing. In some ways, she should be a model for Christians artists today. At the same time we cannot just take her talent and ignore her weaknesses. I have a lot of temptation to leave her behind. There are other great writers that are less problematic (at least in the area of race) that are also quite talented. (There are also many that are significantly worse.) Maybe I will leave her behind, because I do think it is important that we start paying attention to the ways that the church has thought that racism was problem, but not a large enough one to do much about. But I will struggle because taking the good and leaving the bad is not as easy if you have, as I have, realized that much of the history of the problems of White Christianity has been exactly the result of wanting to individualize the sin by taking the good and leaving the bad instead of systematizing the sin by understanding it in a broader context.

Artful Downers

While O'Connor's "A Good Man Is Hard to Find" collection is by no means a mood-lifter, the writing is so beautiful and the characters vivid and just unlikable enough that it's not so hard to accept the horrible things that often happen to them. In this collection, that balance isn't there for me. "Everything that Rises Must Converge" tells mostly the stories of people trying very hard to be good and ultimately failing in tragic, unjust ways. They read more like cautionary tales than anything else. I found "The Comforts of Home" probably the most disturbing.

It's true that O'Connor's trademark brilliant characterization and tension building is as present in these stories as it is in the rest of her work, but I ultimately wouldn't recommend this unless you're an immoral person who needs straightening out or you just really get a kick out of human suffering.