On The Strange Birds of Flannery O'Connor
Colleen Warren
On the title page to her book, The Strange Birds of Flannery O’Connor: A Life, Amy Alznauer inserts the dedication that the young Flannery O’Connor used for her own first fictional manuscript, Mistaken Identity: “Especially prepared for highly intelligent adults and precocious children.” Given that O’Connor’s book was never published, this dual audience posed no real problem for her, but in Alznauer’s case, it is perhaps the factor most problematic for the success of her book.
On the one hand, the bold oversize of the book and its splashy, vibrant artwork is perfectly suited for a young audience. Ping Zhu’s illustrations, with their distorted perspective, cartoonish drawings, and expansive, colorful stretches of empty space, would grab the attention of a four to nine year old, the age group that both picture books and easy readers target. At approximately 1400 words, the book also fits nicely within the word count of a picture book (around 1000 words) and an easy reader (up to 2500 words). However, Alznauer’s vocabulary at points strays from accessibility (ferocity, fiery, obsessively, bizarre, diagnosed and unfurled are some examples), and more importantly, her content sometimes veers into areas inappropriate for a young reader: she includes, for example, the death of O’Connor’s father, an element dropped in with a turn of the page, as well as O’Connor’s own death of lupus. On another page, she has the young O’Connor speculating whether she could “seize [a chicken] by the neck and hack off its head.” Philosophically, too, the book introduces musings that would be confusing and incomprehensible to a young audience. For example, Alznauer imagines O’Connor reflecting on her father’s death: “Death wakes a person up, she thought, like a wound in the side. She felt her heart filling up with grief but even more with wonder. How strange to find something large and beautiful rushing in with all that sadness.” Or, with reference to O’Connor’s authorial focus, Alznauer writes that “she wanted her stories to be as strange as death and to burn with sorrow and hope.”
Toggling between two audiences makes it difficult to appeal well to either. This is most evident in the scope she chooses for the book. In her author’s note, Alznauer claims that she wanted the book to focus on O’Connor’s childhood, and her title, of course, announces a particular interest in the strange birds that so captivated O’Connor. If Alznauer had confined herself to these foci in telling O’Connor’s story and had not included the subtitle A Life, a very different book could have emerged. Only half of the book’s forty-eight pages engage O’Connor’s childhood, and though Alznauer is intent upon mentioning strange birds on nearly every page spread, it sometimes feels too intentional, even forced, as for example, is the case when she writes, “She wanted to wake readers up like a rooster crowing and shock them into seeing,” or when she imagines O’Connor walking through a field of “muddy, familiar geese.” Every “strange bird” story that Alznauer relates has potential for creative expansion; instead of feeling compelled to cover O’Connor’s entire life span, Alznauer could have achieved her purposes better had she chosen to expand a single story, say, for example, O’Connor’s most famous bird story, when the five year old Flannery received national attention for her teaching a chicken to walk backwards.
Ultimately, though I don’t feel this book succeeds as a picture book geared towards children, it could be a delightful adult indulgence, a return to the simple pleasure of words and quirky experiences that draw most readers to O’Connor in the first place. One of the things Alznauer does best, for example, is to subtly present O’Connor herself as the ultimate “strange bird,” from her imagining that she can “[rocket] off the ground in her Tarso-Supernators,” the corrective shoes O’Connor had to wear to correct her pigeon toes, to the closing image of O’Connor’s existence after death, her silver crutches becoming wings, transforming her into “the brightest, oddest bird you ever did see.”
Dr. Colleen Warren received her undergraduate degree from Olivet Nazarene College and her MA and PhD from the University of Florida. She is Professor of English at Taylor University, where she teaches American Literature and composition. Her books include Annie Dillard and the Word Made Flesh: An Incarnational Theory of Language (Lehigh UP 2010) and Reentering Eden: Christian Meditation in Nature (forthcoming, Smyth and Helwys). She enjoys running, lifting weights, calligraphy, writing, and spending time wandering in the woods.