In O'Connor's short stories, the classic plot line involves some un-Christian person who undergoes a terrible and shattering experience that may even kill him, and at the same moment has an insight into his own selfishness or vanity or deludedness or greed that has warped his soul all along, but has never been acknowledged. As the Misfit says of the Grandmother in one of O'Connor's best-known stories "A Good Man Is Hard to Find," "She would of been a good woman if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life."

It is usually clear to the reader what the failing of the character is, and uncomfortably so, for these are not really evil figures; most of the people she depicts are, like the grandmother, more blind and self-centered than diabolical, more unconsciously racist than crazed with a...