Word: connor
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...summary: HARVARD PRINCETON Coulter lw Elsaesser Key c Roberts McKean rw Clarkson Greeley ld O'Connor Washburn rd Ryerson Yetman g Callanan...
...common chord struck in all the stories-sex not as sensual experience but as a disturbing drive that leads people to behavior they can hardly control and but dimly understand. In one beautiful tale, The Babes in the Wood, O'Connor enters the shadow-world of painfully solemn, almost preternatural children who suffer from their elders' illicit affairs. O'Connor's bitterest stories are implicit denunciations of the sexual attitudes-or lack of them-of the prim, provincial and pious sort of Irishwoman. When a husband, desperately annoyed with his wife's unwifely reliance...
Priests. In many of the stories, O'Connor takes a mild jab at the clergy: Father Ring, a well-meaning but not too wise busybody; Father Cassidy, a worldly sort nonplussed by a girl's blithe confession of sin ("A philosopher of 60 letting Eve, aged 19, tell him about the apple!"); and Father Foley, a tragic figure who finds himself in love with a woman ("He sat by the fire wondering what his own life might have been with a girl like that, all furs and scents and laughter...
...Connor's effects are the result of a highly skillful use of language. He finds his images in daily experience ("She had a sallow face that looked very innocent down the middle and full of guile round the edges like a badly ironed pillow case") and composes dialogue that is corrosively revealing...
...doubt The Common Chord will be belittled by those who mistake lugubriousness for seriousness and who dismiss O'Connor as a minor writer unworthy of his master, Joyce. But to write a work of minor stature as well as O'Connor does is in itself a kind of triumph all too rare...