There is a passage in All in the Family where the narrator, Jack Kinsella, something of a novelist, is thinking of his books:

I think they were all good books of their kind: they were honest, decently plotted, with believable characters, and were reasonably well written. I was proud of writing them, in fact; I knew that not everyone could have written them, and indeed that many writers who were better than I could not have written them, either.

Kinsella is not O'Connor, but this seems to me a fair account of O'Connor's novels. Except for The Oracle, which is merely a caricature, the novels are serious studies of the relation between people and institutions. O'Connor's imagination was always concerned with the stress between an individual's nature and the public terms in which it is defined. The Last Hurrah: or what happens when the institution itself changes, runs...