The bell has finally tolled for Flannery O'Connor. The National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize have both passed up the opportunity to honor her posthumous collection of short stories, Everything that Rises Must Converge. Still, you can't help wondering what best-sellerdom could have done to a book like this. Few will read it through and most of those who stop at the halfway mark will become rabid anti-O'Connorites. Of all the first-rate American writers of the century, she is the easiest to put down. Her characters are self-conciously larger than life, her prose laden with portent in every semi-colon, her plotting so relentlessly tragic that every sentence is like a step – inevitable and often predictable – toward a witches' brew of a Grand Guignol finale. Impatient readers will feel Flannery is getting nowhere pretty slow. After some stirring and simmering of emotions, they'll quit and stop reading short of the climax, with the worst possible results. An O'Connor story is not one of those “New Yorker” Flirtations that ramble charmingly and stop coquettishly: Flannery O'Connor is no playful, teasing minx.