SOURCE: L'Heureux, John. “Flannery Will Get You Nowhere.” Los Angeles Times Book Review (12 May 1996): 4.

In the following review, L'Heureux notes the influence of Flannery O'Connor on An Echo of Heaven.

In 1994, Kenzaburo Oe was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature and in his Stockholm speech, describing his vocation as novelist, he quoted Flannery O'Connor: To write novels is for him “a habit of being.” It is not by chance that to define the concrete he resorts to abstraction, nor by chance that to talk about himself this quintessentially Japanese writer quotes an American Catholic whose every story worried the problem of nature and grace, mystery and manners, reason and revelation.

An Echo of Heaven, surely the most abstract of Oe's novels, takes as its starting point O'Connor's idea of God's interference in the daily business of this world. He takes it further than O'Connor would be willing to...